COVID in Cusco: Week 38
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Published: December 6th 2020
The Covid Relief Project's first chocolatada
After months of planning, I was so happy to finally have our first chocolatada! We went to five "microcuenca" which are about two hours up into the mountains from the town of Calca. We took hot chocolate, food and warm clothes for children for about 150 families.I’m still so happy about last week’s trek around Mt. Ausangate! The mountains here are one of the biggest reasons that I wanted to move to Cusco. It’s really amazing to see how different the climate here is, depending on the altitude. When you get down below the altitude of Cusco, you realize that you’re really close to the equator. Even just going to Machu Picchu, which is only about three hours away, takes you into the cloud forest and the very edge of the Amazon rainforest.
When you head up into the mountains higher than Cusco, you are immediately in the high altitude ecosystem, where all plants are tiny and very few trees or crops can grow. I’ve always wondered why, and finally took the time to look it up. Part of the reason is that the air, which has less oxygen for us, also has
less carbon dioxide for plants. They struggle to live for the same reason that we struggle to breathe: the air is just too thin.
My aunt sent me an article from yesterday’s
Seattle Times about the effect of the pandemic on farmers in Peru. The farmers interviewed are in Pisac, which is only about an hour north of Cusco. The town of
The cauldron of hot chocolate
We had asked the communities ahead of time to have a big pot of boiling water ready for us to add the cloves, cinnamon, bricks of chocolate, fresh milk and sugar. Traditional Peruvian hot chocolate is to powdered hot chocolate what homemade sourdough bread is to Wonderbread. Pisac itself has suffered from the death of tourism, although lots of the expats who live in Cusco moved to Pisac to escape the high Covid case numbers in Cusco. Several people I know who moved there also said that the police are less strict in Pisac and that it’s easier for them to go for hikes in the surrounding hills.
The article says that part of what is hurting farmers is that prices for crops have dropped, leaving them with less income and sometimes unable to sell what they farmed. As I’ve learned through working on the
Covid Relief Project, part of the reason for this is the disappearance of tourists. Normally, Cusco and the Sacred Valley welcome thousands of tourists every day. We used to have a steady stream of flights landing in Cusco, bringing people to fill the hotels, and more importantly for the farmers, the restaurants.
Restaurants in the Cusco region rely on local produce, which not only makes the food better, it supports thousands of families who farm small plots of land. Most of these plots are fields smaller than a city block.
Peru’s Agrarian Reform of 1969 broke up the big landowners, most of whom had inherited their
Waiting for hot chocolate
Even with the morning drizzle, the children were cheerful as they waited in line for their hot chocolate. estates as descendents of Spanish families granted the land during colonization. The system had perpetuated a kind of serfdom that bordered on slavery, which I can still hardly believe lasted through the 1960s. One result of the Agrarian Reform is that the families who farmed and lived on the land actually became the landowners.
I met
families who rely on farming near Pisac on July 11th, as one of the Covid Relief Project village visits to deliver emergency food assistance. We visited two small communities and at one got to hear from a community member who talked about how forgotten these families feel. He said that
">they work so hard to provide food for Peruvians, but that they don’t get any attention from the government. They don’t have a health clinic and their school hardly gets any funding. Unfortunately, this is the case of every community that I’ve gone to since we started the project.
Like most countries around the world, the poorest people in Peru are hit the hardest by the economic collapse caused by the pandemic. The World Bank estimates that the
pandemic will push 49 million people into extreme poverty in 2020. It’s easy to feel helpless in the face of numbers like that, but I hope that what little I can do for rural families in the Cusco region
Linda
One of the people who helped us today is Linda. We are so thankful to her for joining us! She was a huge help and smiled through all of the rain and changes in plans. does make a difference for them.
Monday, 30 November, 2020 After Black Friday, today is another day devoted in part to the celebration of corporate America: Cyber Monday. Of course, since both of these days are related to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, they’re not really a thing outside of the US. However, I’ve been thinking of visiting my parents for my Dad’s birthday in February, which means that I’ve been shopping for plane tickets online.
Taking advantage of some Cyber Monday deals, I managed to buy flights from Cusco all the way to Boise and back for only about $600. In 2019, that was the price of the cheapest one way tickets. The pandemic’s effect on the airlines, while tragic for many of their employees, is definitely a big help for me.
I haven’t been back to the US since I left to move to Cusco, in August 2019. By the time I make it to Boise for Dad’s birthday, that will have been a year and a half in Peru. I’ve been away longer, when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco 2005-2007, but since then have gone back every year, even when I
Missing adults
There were very few adults at the first chocolatada because it had been accidentally scheduled at the same time as a meeting to elect the next community president of Ttio Grande. was living in Turkey and Bangladesh.
I suspect that seeing Seattle and Boise during the pandemic will be a bit of a shock. Currently, the US is starting to see the effect of people gathering for Thanksgiving last week and the huge
spike in Covid cases is predicted to get even worse in the coming weeks. I think that everybody expected there to be a spike in cases as a result of people trying to have a normal Thanksgiving. I bet that the consequences of Christmas and New Year will be similar.
For me, the question is, will case numbers be on the decline in February? Will the spike in cases from the holidays scare enough people into staying home? Will the Biden/Harris administration issue enough mandates to get the pandemic more under control before I arrive in Boise on February 19th? How bad will it be when I get there?
The other question is, can I keep myself from catching Covid as I navigate five airports? Between my apartment and my parent’s house are the Cusco, Lima, Mexico City, Seattle and Boise airports. From what I’ve ready,
being on the airplane isn’t that dangerous because of how air is filtered. The danger will be in the airports. Can a mask and
Hot chocolate and mini-panettone
Thankfully, we did have a few adults there to help us make and distribute the hot chocolate. hand sanitizer keep me from getting Covid in all of those high-traffic areas?
Just like in August I was terrified of the idea of taking Covid to one of the isolated mountain villages that I was going to with the Covid Relief Project, I am now terrified of the idea of giving my Dad Covid for his birthday. I’ll be as careful as I can, not staying at my parents’ house and trying to find ways to visit them outside. The social distancing and visiting them while staying outside will definitely be a challenge in Boise in late February. The weather is likely to be horrible: wet and cold. I have just under three months to find as many ways as possible to minimize the possibility of giving my parents Covid.
Tuesday, 1 December, 2020 This morning I sent an email to everybody who has donated to the Covid Relief project. I’ve been planning a big fundraising campaign for today’s Giving Tuesday event. It turned out to be even better than I had hoped and we not only got the rest of what we needed for Ocongate, we also raised enough for two more communities! That means
Second on hot chocolate!
We didn't have enough mini-panettone to give out more than one per person, but there was plenty of hot chocolate for everybody to have seconds and thirds. that this Saturday is our first chocolatada and we can do four, maybe even five more! I had already planned to do chocolatadas on every Saturday before Christmas, but now we can also add two Sundays: December 13th and the 20th.
A big part of the support I got today wasn’t actually from the people who had donated between May and August. It was from Andrea, whose family owns the
Maytaq Wasin Boutique Hotel here in Cusco. One of her siblings sent $200 and two of her friends in the US each sent $800. I am still floored by the $800 donations. That is way, way, way more than I hoped to get and I’m so thankful for their generosity. Those two donations alone let me add December 13th and 20th to our chocolatada calendar.
One of those donations is from the Weisman family in Chicago. The other is from a woman who asked to mostly be anonymous, but said that I could list her as Maria Te, if I needed a name for the donation. She said that she had looked up what it would cost her to fly from her home in St. Louis, Missouri to Cusco and decided
Elio from the Calca mayor's office
Elio, in the brown jacket, was a huge help in organizing the transportation and contacting the communities. He is very dedicated to his job assisting community development and we could never have done any of today without his hard work. to match that $800 flight cost with a donation, since she wasn’t able to travel in 2020. The name Maria Te is the name that she was given at the orphanage in Cusco, from which she was adopted by a family from St. Louis.
Even more than the amount of her donation, the story really hit me. How amazing is it that she is able to give so much to families here? I couldn’t find the right words for my thank you email to her. How can I be profuse enough? How can I actually thank her for what this will mean here? I will definitely be sending her lots of photos of the little girls in the community where we take her donation.
Today I also got to speak with students at a school I used to work at, thanks to former colleague Ernesto. He teaches Spanish and has been talking about the Quechua language and indigenous people from the Andes in two of his classes. I asked Auqui to participate with me, as a native speaker of Quechua and indigenous person from the Andes. The kids had sent us questions ahead of time, so we were
Sarah
We are so happy that Sarah volunteered to leave Cusco at 6am and spend all day in the rain with us. She kept our spirits up and many people told me that they wanted a hat just like hers. prepared for most of them.
I liked how Ernesto had set the class up for each student to ask us a question. They asked all kinds of things about the Quechua language, who speaks it and why it’s dying out. We told them how little the government was doing to support the language and the people who still speak Quechua. We also told them about the strong connection between the language and the land. Communities where people have stopped speaking Quechua are more likely to allow mining on their land and other forms of environmental degradation. (This is anecdotal, not based on any research that I’m aware of).
Auqui was impressed that the students already knew a fair amount the Quechua language and how it is already dying out. Auqui told them that when he was a kid, he could walk out his door and hear everybody around him speaking Quechua. By the time he was a teenager, it had already changed to Spanish. I suggested to the students that the advances in education, starting in the 1990s, had made a huge difference. There was a big effort to decrease illiteracy and improve access to education for all
Family representative
Since most of the adults were at the community election, we tried to find at least a teenager to represent each family to receive their rice and vegetable oil. children in Peru, especially those high in the mountains who had previously had no schools within walking distance.
Unfortunately, this push in education was purely in Spanish. Kids have to learn Spanish to understand their history, math and science classes. There was no comparable push for kids to be able to learn in Quechua, even if that was the only language that they already spoke. Obviously, there was no effort to teach Quechua or even try to preserve the language. As a result, most Peruvians my age speak very little Quechua, though some understand it. Younger Peruvians likely don’t understand a word their grandparents say.
It’s the sort of problem that will take massive governmental support to change. Waiting another ten years might be too little, too late. Considering the current need for governments all around the world to battle a pandemic and economic collapse, I don’t see the Peruvian government taking the necessary steps anytime soon. I hope I’m wrong about that.
Wednesday, 2 December, 2020 Thinking more about yesterday’s conferences with the students in Seattle, and on the connection with nature that is such a strong part of Quechua culture, I read a few
Auqui
Auqui is essential in contacting local governments to arrange transportation and pick which communities we'll visit. He's also our Quechua translator, which makes everything easier. articles today about where we’re at in our destruction of the environment. We all know that climate change has a terrible effect on the ecosystems that we’ve known over the past few decades. We all know that humans are creating farmland and building on what used to be habitat for a variety of flora and fauna. We’ve all also seen the news about how quickly that same flora and fauna bounced back in April when people around the world stayed home in quarantine and left that habitat alone.
I was so optimistic in April! I was so sure that with such clear evidence of what we have to do to reduce or even reverse some of our impact on nature, that people around the world would insist that their governments step up their efforts to reduce and reverse that impact. I was so sure that this was the final kick in the rear that humanity needed to wake up and commit to changing the way we treat the environment. So far, I’ve been disappointed.
In a speech today UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres admonished all of us “
Humanity is waging a war on nature. This is suicidal.” I couldn’t agree more. We’re not going to kill every
Leaving Ttio Grande
I wish we had been able to spend more time in Ttio Grande, but we had to hit the road to get to the next community, which was over a half an hour away. other species on the planet, but the more we do kill, the more likely it will be that humanity won’t survive. Those of us who do survive this suicidal war probably won’t like the planet that’s left to live on. Of course, Guterres, like
">David Attenborough, are careful to point out that it’s not too late to reverse our course. We can still make sweeping changes and restore some of the places that we’ve damaged most. Tot: 0.164s; Tpl: 0.017s; cc: 6; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0482s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
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