The place I call home

Although I was initially supposed to move in with a Dutch girl in a three-room flat, my plans changed upon arriving here in Cajamarca. I decided not to stay with Sara and moved to Manthoc, home to several volunteers, including my colleague Silvia. The problem with the first flat was by no means Sara, my ex future flat mate, she is very nice and we’re good friends. I simply didn’t feel at home in the house: it was in urgent need of repair and next to no sunlight entered into the rooms. Besides, Sara has three jobs and works from early morning till late at night, so I would have been alone at home a lot. At Manthoc I'm never alone; there is always someone to talk to.

Manthoc is actually an NGO that works for the rights of child labourers; the residence is just a way to finance the social projects. I don’t feel I contribute very much, though: the monthly rent is around 60 €, including water, gas, electricity, cleaning, Internet, and even towels and sheets. Like all houses in Cajamarca, ours lacks heating, but I don’t suffer from cold at all It’s just a question of dressing appropriately and sleeping under several blankets.



At the moment we are only five: Daniela (Peruvian), Silvia (Italian), Andrea (Italian), Stéphan (French), and I. Towards the end of July we are expecting two new girls from Germany and a boy from the U.S. I get really well along with my flatmates and spend most of my free time with them. I’m getting more and more convinced about that sharing a flat is a lot more fun than living alone! We have a pet, too: her name is Danielita, and she is the hugest rat I have ever seen. Thankfully I have only met her once and that in the kitchen, not in my room.





Most of the volunteers in the Finnish Volunteer Programme headed to Africa, and I'm convinced that I have it a million times easier than they do. I can take a warm shower as many times a day as I like, I have Internet at home (expect for frequent service cuts), our kitchen is well equipped; all in all, my home is very comfortable. No dirt floors, cold water, cockroaches, leaking roofs, or anything of the like. I don’t feel I live in a third world country, in fact!

Stomach problems

Up until last week I had eaten happily everything Peruvian cuisine had to offer, and the commonplace diarrhoea was all I had had. On Monday evening, however, the most horrible stomach disease ever hit me, and I kept throwing up through the entire night – worst night of my life. First I thought it was mere food poisoning, but since by Thursday I wasn’t feeling much better, I figured it must be something else and went to see a doctor. The diagnosis was a stomach infection, probably due to the glass of water I had been served at a café on Monday afternoon. I did suspect the water hadn’t been boiled, but since I’d seen local friends drink tap water, I thought it was no big deal. Big mistake!

The doctor prescribed me some herbs and other natural products (thanks to the Amazon rainforest, Peru is incredibly rich in traditional medicine), and told me to eat only cream crackers, pears, sweet apples, peaches, chicken soup, and gelatine for the next three days. I started feeling quite fine during the weekend, got sick of chicken soup, gave up on the diet, and had chicken with French fries on Sunday evening – and got ill again.

I had another doctor’s appointment on Monday, and the physician reckoned that my organism is not used to the sky-high amount of unsaturated fats Peruvian food contains and cannot stand them, at least not now that I’m still recovering from the stomach infection. That may well be true, considering that in Finland everything is salt-free, fat-free, calorie-free and sugar-free to the point that it’s scary. I got another set of instructions and a long list of foods I must not eat for 15 days: red meat, fats, spices, alcohol, coffee, chocolate, soft drinks, egg yolk, avocados, mangos, oranges, bananas, butter.

I feel ridiculous every time I go to a restaurant (twice a day, that is), because I have to ask a million questions about the food: Which dish contains the least amount of fat? Has the water surely been boiled? Is there red meat in the soup? Oh, there is. Is there any alternative first dish? No? I’m sorry, but I’ll have to go someplace else then... But on the other hand, now I’m feeling perfectly fine, something I’ve really come to value lately. When I was at my worst, I got really homesick for the first time here, and actually toyed with the idea of giving up and flying home.

On every second streetlight pole there is an advertisement saying Pierda peso en 7 días, Lose weight in 7 days. I could patent my own miraculous cure of the same sort, tried and tested. I don’t guarantee it works for locals, but for foreigners it is sure to be efficient. Nice and simple: drink un-boiled tap water, and you can eat next to nothing for the following week – you’re bound to lose some kilos. It is pure torture, I admit, but isn’t it a known fact that one must make sacrifices for the sake of looks?
P.S. Don’t try!

Everyday life

Up till now, I have mostly written about parades, celebrations and the like. It is about time I describe my everyday work here. In Warmayllu we work long hours, so on weekdays I don’t have time to get bored. The days I work at the office, I show up at around 9 a.m., go for lunch at 1 p.m. and head back by 4 p.m. We call it a day at 7 or 7:30 p.m.

About three days a week I go up to the countryside to teach English, conduct interviews, or film a documentary. Those days the morning is considerably longer, since we leave early and get back late, just in time to have lunch and take a short rest before going back to work in the afternoon. However, the tempo at work is not quite the same as in Finland, and I have taken the liberty to make phone calls on Skype, upload photos on Facebook, and write e-mails while supposedly working.

First and foremost, I teach English at two secondary schools near Cajamarca, in Cushunga and in Chamis. Below, the Chamis school building, brand new (no running water, indoor toilets or electricity, though).



There are no textbooks to bide by, and what comes to the study plan, I have been given a free hand. On one hand, very liberating and inspiring, but on the other hand, quite challenging. There is a lot of preparing to do, since I cannot just show up and tell the pupils to open their workbook on page 56 and start with exercise number 2. Of all my groups, only the Chamis second graders knew a little something to begin with, so with all the rest I started from scratch.

At first the pupils were a bit intimidated by my participative methodology. What they are used to is copying quietly what the teacher writes on the board. My goal is to get them to relax and to open their mouth, so we sing, play games, act out small sketches. And if we have some fun in the meantime, all the better! Thanks to the English School preschool, I know hundreds of children’s songs, and have been drawing on that repertoire. Head, shoulders, knees, and toes seems to be the pupils’ favourite up to now.

Little by little, the pupils have grown a lot more active and brave. Now they are eager to practice what they have learnt: once they spot me climbing up to the school, they all shout “Good morning, teacher! How are you, teacher!” I have even got some of the students to call me “tú” instead of the more formal “usted”, which in Peruvian schools is surely unheard of.

Compared to Finnish teenagers, Peruvian secondary school kids are incredibly well-behaved, respectful, and motivated. Few children in the countryside have the chance to continue in secondary school, and I have the feeling that my students are quite conscious of that. What bothers me, though, is that about one in every 15 pupils is a girl. Poor families in the countryside apparently do not see the point in sending girls to secondary school, since all they will become in life is mothers and housewives anyway. Below a picture of the Chamis first graders, no girls among the group.



Every school day takes up a lot of time. I leave Cajamarca together with the other teachers at 7:20 a.m. by taxi in order to arrive at the school at 8 or 8:30, depending on which school we are going to. There are apparently no traffic rules regarding the maximum number of passengers, or at least they are not effectively enforced, since we are usually between 9 and 11 in a normal 5-seat car: two plus the driver in front, four or five in the back seat and three in the trunk. Add bumpy and winding roads, and you probably understand why the morning car ride is not my favourite part of the day.

After four classes, it is time to head home. I return to Cajamarca on foot: two hours from Cushunga, one and a quarter from Chamis – walking at a fast pace, that is. I like the return trip a lot better. Walking is good for you, and the scenery is magnificent. Every time I come across another wayfarer, we greet each other. Sometimes people are curious to know who I am and where I am from, and we stop to chat for a short while.

Besides teaching, I have been busy translating documents from Spanish to English and Finnish, transliterating stories, helping out at the office, and writing articles for the book that is to accompany the Turvallinen maailma – Un Mundo Seguro photo exhibition. Below is a picture of some of the primary school kids I interviewed about family relations.



Next week I plan to go watch how the Fiesta de San Juan (24th of June) is celebrated in Chamis and conduct some interviews to write an article on communal feasts.

My most recent project is filming a documentary on some mummies that have been found up on the mountains in Jamcate, 28 kilometres from Cajamarca. For the time being, they are stored at the local primary school. That means that they have been dumped on a table in the storage room – no glass cases, no air conditioning, no fences. The mummies date back about 500 years, and they are extremely well preserved: you can still make out each toe nail. The locals are building a museum for the mummies, and the idea is for the documentary to be a kind of advertisement for the museum. I have already climbed up the mountain (4.000 metres above sea level!) to film the caves where the mummies were found and the breath-taking scenery.



Next up is filming the mummies, which slightly freaks me out, because I fear it involves actually touching the 500-year-old corpses and arranging them in photogenic positions.

First guest from Finland!

This week I hosted my first visitor from Finland! Emilia, my classmate from elementary school, is travelling around South America and stayed in Cajamarca from Tuesday to Saturday. Conveniently enough, Cajamarca celebrated the Fiesta de Corpus Christi on Thursday and Friday, so I had those two days off and could spend time with Emilia. On Wednesday I did go to work, though, and Emilia accompanied me to Chamis and sat through my four English classes. She was the guest of honour: before going to class, all the pupils lined up on the schoolyard, sang the Peruvian national anthem in Quechua for Emilia, and put their as yet fairly limited English skills to the test by exchanging some pleasantries with her.

Since I hadn’t had much time for tourism during the four weeks I’d spent here (although I admit that lack of time is always an excuse), Emilia’s visit was a perfect chance to finally get to know Cajamarca and its environs. We climbed up Santa Apolonia hill to enjoy the view over the city,



walked around the city centre (which, in the case of Cajamarca, is not exactly huge) and the mercado, took a relaxing, very hot bath in the Baños del Inca,



took a tour to Cumbe Mayo (famous for its rock formations),





went to the pre-Incan necropolis of Otusco,



visited the Llacanora waterfalls,



and had a look at the famous Cuarto del Rescate where Inca Atahualpa was held prisoner by the Spaniards. Emilia even dared to go watch a bullfight at the Corpus Christi fair, but I chickened out of it at the last minute. I suppose no matter how many years I spend in Hispanic countries, I won’t get it out of myself to sit and watch bulls being killed, not even for the sake of curiosity. On Thursday morning we got to admire some enormous paintings that had been painted on streets around the Plaza de Armas in honour of the Corpus Christi feast.



It was great having Emilia over, and showing her around made me realize just how much I’ve grown to like Cajamarca!

On being blonde in Cajamarca

In the city of Cajamarca, people are fairly used to having foreigners around. Besides the occasional "Hola bonita / gringuita / rubita / guapa", I am left in peace. On the countryside, however, gringos are conspicuous by their absence and I feel like a living tourist attraction. People keep asking me to pose for pictures. “¡Una fotito, por favor, señorita! In front of the school building, please! With my little Carlitos. And another one with my daughters! And one more with all the kids!” Apparently seeing a gringa in Cushunga, Jamcate or San Juan de Chamis is such a once-in-a-lifetime occasion that it is worth saving on film. Anaїs tells me to start charging one sol per picture, but I haven’t come to such lengths yet.

Middle school pupils are old and well-behaved enough not to ask stupid questions. Preschool and primary school children, on the other hand, have not yet learnt to conceal their curiosity. At first they are intimidated by my presence. When I smile at them, they liven up and grow braver. After opening the conversation with some politically correct small talk about sisters and brothers, for example, the boldest ones dare to ask: "Why is your hair white?" I explain that I’m from a country far away where most people have hair like mine. What follows is a flood of questions: “Has your hair always been that way? Does it come off? Did you colour it? Is it white because you are old?” The most audacious ones stretch out to touch my hair.

The last time I was at Jamcate (28 km outside Cajamarca), the sun shone so brightly at noon that I took off my sweater, and that caused an uproar. “Your skin is so WHITE!” The kids were so excited they could barely stay still. A dozen gathered around me, and a hoard of tiny hands reached out for my bare arms. “It feels just like normal skin!” announced one of the youngest girls triumphantly.

The children up in the countryside do not have television or magazines. They practically never visit Cajamarca, and not even the marvellous world of advertising has reached its long grip to the remote mountain villages, since their inhabitants lack purchasing power. Ads, of course, have nothing to do with reality. A beautiful, blue-eyed woman shakes her blonde locks in a Peruvian shampoo ad. Another smiling, blonde girl advertises mineral water. That is ridiculous considering that next to all Peruvians are dark-haired and brown-eyed.

Peru is a racist country. The whiter your skin, the higher the chances are that you can read and write, that you do not go to bed hungry, and that you get your voice heard in issues that concern your daily life. In colonial times, one could buy “white skin” and so climb up the social ladder.

It amuses me that 7-year-old girls pull my hair to see if the wig comes off. On the contrary, it makes me angry that they ask me to switch eyes or hair with them because they want white hair and green eyes, too. I try to tell them that their own long, shiny black hair is beautiful, but they don’t look too convinced. Colour shouldn’t matter; it is unfair and frustrating that it does.