Leymebamba Viewed From the Museum Trail
Two weeks have passed fairly quickly in this quiet little mountain town. We’ve been plenty busy teaching English. When we arrived there were only about 10 hours of class a week for each of us, mostly for adults that have major attendence problems, to the point that some nights only one of us teaches the few students who attend. That’s far too much free time in a town this small. We already had too much downtime at the farm in Ecuador, so here we wanted to be busy and involved, so we started teaching at the local schools.
Every week day we’re teaching an hour at the grade school and a half hour at the preschool. We’ve rediscovered a few of our childhood songs for teaching purposes like “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”. Classic and perfect for little kids who would much rather move than memorize. We’ve got songs for days of the week and colors too. We also started another afternoon class for kids who want to come.
Pronunciation really is difficult for Spanish speakers since there’s so many sounds they just don’t have in their language. I’ve spent HOURS trying to teach people to make a “th” sound. I’m teaching to all beginners, every class, so I’ve been going over basics like numbers, days of the week, greetings, etc a LOT. Kim has the only advanced class and she’s liking it, so that’s cool.
The weather has been mostly sunny and the scenery around here is gorgeous. We’re in a valley with a pretty river and green mountains all around. I think the rain is even pretty and I’ve actually enjoyed the rainy days when they come since it rains hard and washes everything. We’re techinically in “winter” now, but they only have two seasons here, and they’re really just the rainy season, which they call winter, and the not rainy season, aka summer. It hasn’t been too rainy for us though so far.
We’ve gone to the museum which has a bunch of mummies that they discovered on the land of the family we’re staying with. There’s dozens and dozens of ruins and discoveries of past civilizations in the area. They’ve only really just begun to develop this area for tourism. The problem with most of the sites for tourism is that they’re hard to get to. The Laguna de Condores, where they discovered the museum mummies, is a three day trip from Leymebamba, and getting to Leymebamba is no day trip either. It’s 3 or more hours down a bumpy dirt road from the nearest “city”, Chachapoyas, which is only accessible right now by a highway that’s under construction so that it’s passable only at night. They’re improving the roads though, even if slowly, and I think that will make all the difference in developing the region.
We also went to Kuelap which is an ancient Chachapoyan (people of the clouds) fortress that supposedly rivals Machu Pichu for grandeur. We definitely liked it. We hiked to it instead of taking a car since we didn’t know the schedule and might have had to wait for hours for a car to get there. The hike was a little over four hours of all uphill. We climbed a little under 4000 feet in that time. I think the downhill was harder though since we were already tired and downhill is so much harder on joints.
I’ve been reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books and playing some old Nintendo games in my down time. I was definitely going through video game withdrawal for awhile. I realllllllly missed playing video games, but the laptop I have with me really isn’t fast enough for many games and downloading anything from here would take forever with the slow connection. Then I remembered you can download Nintendo emulators and the game files are tiny, so I’m playing some of my old Super Nintendo favorites. That’s actually a big help when I start feeling homesick.
Aside from school Kim’s been cooking a lot. The family we’re living with includes a couple close to our age, Omer and Estefani, and Estefani wants to learn to cook some of our favorite foods since they’re opening a tourist restaurant in a few months. There’s kitchen so it’s great that we have space to cook our own stuff since we’re in general NOT big fans of Peruvian food. I’ll rant about that later.
Julio and Wilma are Omer’s parents and the owners of the hostal, and there’s a child, Omer Jr, who is going through a bratty phase right now. It’s nice living with a family and still having plenty of our own space and downtime. Although I’m a little jealous of the previous volunteers who were in a different hostal that was quite a bit more modern with a washer, private bathrooms, and windows in the rooms. We have a shared bathroom here with one of those damnable electric water heaters that scare me to death and only warm a little water at a time. Our room has a balcony which is cool, but there’s no windows, just the wooden doors to the balcony, which we don’t really want to leave open at night, so in the morning when we wake up it’s pitch dark no matter what time we wake up.
I’ve really begun to realize how great a lot of the appliances and utilities we have back home are. We washed our clothes by hand today and that just sucks. It’s so much less efficient than a washer. I don’t mind hand drying clothes as it’s fairly easy, not messy and uses less energy, but washing by hand is not efficient at all for the water usage. I also really miss reliable water. A lot. I can’t wait to get home and turn the tap and have hot water, drinkable water, and have it all the time! We haven’t had running water all day. When we do have water we have to let the dirt in it settle, then pour it in a pot and boil it. The water comes from the local river and the sewage gets pumped right back into that same river. The power goes out frequently. In fact it was just out for five minutes as I write this. They have internet and phone in the village via satellite so phone calls are expensive and internet is slow. Amazingly Skype works, so we can use that to call home cheap, even it is a little laggy. They have 3 telephones in the town, so if you want to call someone here from another city, you call, someone answers, you tell them who you want to talk to and hang up. Then you call back in 10 or so minutes and hope the person could be found and came to the phone.
So far it’s a great experience and the people are famously friendly. There’s much less noise and traffic than where we were before, which is amazingly nice. The students when they do show up are eager and grateful. I want to emphasize that I like it here, because I’ve been writing a lot about things that I miss and am about to talk about some cultural differnces. It’s just that differences and stuff that I miss is more interesting to read about than me going on about how pretty the countryside is. Besides, living without the conveniences and at a slower pace of life helps you appreciate what you have in the US when you return.
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before about South America in general, the pace of life is much slower. People say they’ll do something at 1, which really means that they might show up at 1:30, maybe 2. Sometimes not at all. We’ve met a ton of people who say they’d like to go to English classes and that they WILL be there. They never show up. Many of our students who do show up for the 8 o’clock class show up at 8:30.
There’s no one grocery store here. There’s about a dozen very small shops though that all have close to the same stuff. However, if you want something other than rice, potatoes and onions you might have to go to 3 or 4 stores before you find what you want. We’re amazed at how few vegetables people eat here, excluding potatoes of course. I think they eat more rice than in China too. It sounds to me like people have lost a lot of the healthy eating habits that their ancestors had living off the land. Most meals consist of rice, potatoes, some meat and a lot of salt. Fortunately there’s one restaurant in town where the owner is one of our students, and the couple before us were vegetarian also, so the owner knows how to cook for us.
Phew, if you read that much congratulations. I’m sure the next two weeks will pass just as quickly if not more so. The children we teach are going on their “summer” vacation until march though, so we may soon have few classes. But with Christmas and New Years come up I’m sure there will be festivities to keep everyone busy. After Leymebamba we may head to the jungle, we may head to Argentina. Who knows. I’m leaning toward Argentina right now though as I hear it’s more modern and still really cheap. Plans always change though.