One more week in Huancayo

The markets here in Huancayo are absolutely crazy and I love them for it! There is a market here everyday called el Mercado Mayorista. It stretches for nearly 20 square blocks and has everything from shoes (mostly used) to toilet paper (mostly unused). I pass through it every morning on my way to the Coto Coto orphanage. There are blocks and blocks of prematurely wrinkled women in their traditional Andean skirts sitting on the street peering over piles and piles of potatoes. Then you pass through the meat section where hundreds of chickens hang from the ceilings, occasionally dripping into the open eyes of the entire, horned, cow heads which patiently wait for an owner. Walking through the market is hard enough with the thousands of pedestrians, but if you throw in the crazy mini-buses and fruit bearing tricycles, survival is the ultimate goal. Survival without getting pick-pocketed is another thing… so far I have been lucky. My time walking through Time Square in New York, dodging thousands of umbrella bearing tourists on rainy days turned out to be great practice. After leaving the market, I continue walking on the train tracks towards the orphanage. It is here, that I have my daily encounter with the ass-man. I call him the ass-man because he is always out there dancing on the train tracks without a lick of clothing on except for a pair of pants that really just have a waist band and some threads which hold the only fabric… covering his ankles and nothing more. Usually I throw him a ‘good morning’ but lately, I have been ignoring him as he has been busy screaming at the walls as I pass.

Last Friday, a few of the girls from Ladrillera took me on a tour of the community. It’s a day that I will never, ever forget. We took the only mud road that winds through the community weaving between huge brick ovens, mud houses which are smaller than most bathrooms, and large bug-infested pools of mud and water used to make bricks. As we passed through the community, I was often greeted with screeches and muddy hugs from my kids who were working, carrying bricks. That’s life in Ladrillera… everyone works… right down to the 5 year old girl who weighs less than the bricks she is hauling. Occasionally we would pass smoldering brick ovens which blanketed us in smoke, momentarily saving us from the pungent smell of the community’s river/bathroom/clothes cleaning water/bath. My tour guides insisted I also take a tour of the community’s graveyard… it is here, that I saw one of the most haunting and disturbing things of my life. As we trudged up the muddy hill, I noticed a large group of people and children. Apparently, there was a funeral going on that day and the children wanted to take me to see. As we approached the group of quite casual people, I started to feel uncomfortable being at a funeral for someone I didn’t know in a community I hardly knew. It was then that I realized the faces of the people at the funeral… there were smiles and laughter. There were children running around and playing. There was only one lady crying and I was about to find out why. As an elderly man moved to the side, I noticed a stand with a coffin that was no larger than a shoe box. Another infant from Ladrillera had passed away… There was a disturbing amount of… well… Normalcy with what was happening. There was no priest. No seats. No pictures. Just people sitting on a hill side, watching men dig another hole in the already crowded cemetery. That’s life in Ladrillera… infants and babies die here on a regular basis. The community is too poor for health care and is surrounded by disease on a daily basis. Apparently, everyone in the community has had a little brother or little sister die before their second birthday. The girls quickly showed me their little brother’s grave which was little more than a mound of dirt and broken bricks. It was then as, I looked out over the hillside, that I noticed that the majority of graves were astoundingly small. There are a repulsive number of children buried on that hill. In fact, they have built a wall of above-ground sepulchers just for infants… the holes being not much larger than a foot in diameter. Suddenly there became two people crying at the cemetery that day… the girls quickly realized that I wasn’t doing too well and we hurried our way back down the hill to try and play jacks as a distraction.

This Friday, some of us volunteers went out to a bar since 2 girls were leaving the next day. We downed the local pisco sours and calientitos until 3 in the morning. As I was walking back to the house, I noticed a group of guys sitting outside of the internet café that I always go to. It was the extremely friendly owner of the café and his uncles and cousins. They invited me to sit with them and drink some more. It was a lot of fun as we sat there passing around what seemed like a never ending supply of beer. We discussed everything from politics to religion and even the sun that was then rising. At 6:30 in the morning, I decided that it was time for me to get to bed and leave them as they continued to empty beer bottles. The next day, it was decided that there was nothing better to do after 2 hours of sleep, a horrible hang over, and diarrhea than to go rock climbing. A local friend (who happened to be a mountain guide) that we had made friends with took us to a small rock in the woods that he and his friend had found. Although I wasn’t in the best condition of my life, I had a lot of fun rock-climbing for the very first time.

Since I will be leaving Friday to start traveling around Peru, this will probably be my last update from Huancayo. Our initial plan is to head down to Ayacucho for a few days before heading to Cuzco to do the obligatory inca trail hike to Machu Picchu. From there… well… I’ll let you know when I know!

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