Peru Vol. 3

8/6/09 6:33 pm: Comunidad Cosquenos

            Tonight marks our second night here at our new home stay in the Comunidad Cosquenos. It’s a small community consisting mostly of recent immigrants from Cusco that have come to try their hand at farming. Like before, our accommodations consist of an empty shack on a family farm, though this time the roof is thatched and the livestock of choice here is pigs instead of sheep, which are fortunately much less noisy at night. Unfortunately though the nearby quebrata isn’t nearly as deep as it was before making bathing much more of a hassle—though it still contains fish large enough to nibble at one’s toes, as I found out this afternoon. Larry did a nice job building us a makeshift bathing platform though, as well as some shade structures out of palm fronds, which helps a lot with the recent heat. We also still have Delicia’s delicious cuisine and the generator, which gives us luxuries such as watching Never Back Down last night, which, for those of you who haven’t seen it, is basically a cross between Fight Club and High School Musical.

            Today we cut our initial transects into the various forested areas near us. Our proficiency with machetes is steadily rising, though it still takes about two hours to cut a 700 m transect. I’ve decided I’d prefer never to permanently live somewhere with such a high density of life. In some capacity, I find almost all forms of live beautiful and possessing some intrinsic worth—like the dwarf caiman we saw this evening—but when everything, the vegetation, the bugs, etc., is this dense, I see the competition for space and the need to constantly address all the various forms of life around you in one way or another to be more taxing than the additional beauty is worth. There’s the humidity that lends itself to mold, the myriad of wasps encroaching on your food at every meal, and the smorgasbord of blood, intestinal and epidermal parasites that have to constantly be avoided. However, I am quite pleased I get to visit for as long as I do.

8/8/09 4:29 pm: Rain

            It rained for a while this afternoon, and we were pleased to find the roof didn’t leak. We’re ahead of schedule so we had the afternoon off and could all just sit inside, read and listen to an audio book of The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Hemmingway. I’ve been a big Hemmingway fan since I read A Farewell to Arms in high school, which is still a favorite of mine, but I’ve never read his short stories, and this one is particularly incredible. Joel says it’s probably his favorite short story—and certainly the one that’s made him think the most. I also finished Raymond Carver’s collection of short stories, Cathedral, today. He’s another great writer with a style similar to Hemmingway, but with a more everyday flavor. The story “Cathedral” itself has been a favorite of mine since I read it for a creative fiction class, and I would certainly say it’s one of better ways a person could spend half an hour.

            Once the sun came back out everything looked particularly beautiful still wet from the rain—except from the pigs, which more or less look just as bad, and smell substantially worse. I took some pictures, though I doubt my point-and-shoot will do it justice. You get spoiled hanging out with friends who all have nice SLRs.

            The interviews have had some obstacles lately. Caritas, the local NGO we worked with to help set up our current set of interviews hasn’t introduced us and set up our meetings as planned, and now there is a rumor going around that Alex is just the latest gringo trying to come in and buy up, or tax them out of their land. Alex has also said that once the farmers know in advance that they’re getting paid, they see the interview much more as a chore, and treat him more like some bigwig from a wealthy NGO, which is then reflected in the data we get from them. In contrast, the farmers Alex previously flagged down on the side of the road, interviewed over a coke and some plantains, and then paid at the end, have been much friendlier and given much better responses for the study. The bio-inventorying has been going fairly well though. The humidity is inescapable, but it’s so much cooler in the forest it’s hardly any more draining cutting transects and doing gentry plots than just lounging around our shed. When we were out today, I saw some people actually actively clearing trees for the first time on the trip. It was impressive watching the trees fall, but it was also sad seeing the recently cleared land, and it certainly added a sense of urgency to the project.

8/10/09 5:57 pm:

            The last couple of days have definitely been some of the most beautiful. Last night the sunset was gorgeous. The sun here sets in the northwest—which still throws off my internal compass—and last night the cloud cover hung perfectly to reflect the fiery glow of the sunset down on us. It reminded me a lot of how everything looked during the Topanga fire when I was about 7, but this time I had a lot more time to enjoy it since I wasn’t being evacuated. It cast the entire setting in some of the richest warm tones I have ever seen, while yet also making the lush trees and clear sky even more vivid by comparison. By now some of you may have realized this might not mean much coming from someone who is colorblind, but I promise everyone else found it equally beautiful.

            Now, before I go on, I want you to try to imagine how a pineapple grows. Many of you may know already, but I didn’t until this trip, which also made me realize I had never even wondered. If someone had asked me, I would have guessed it was a hanging fruit, but in fact it grows much like an artichoke on the central stalk of an agave like cactus (which, like aloe, Alex has pointed out to me, is not in fact a cactus). Today I also learned that the young pineapple plants, before they are mature enough to fruit, begin with an initial, vibrant coloring of light orange, fading to yellow, and finally a hint of lime green, almost in a psychedelic way. Today we walked through an entire field of these younger plants, and it was was quite stunning.

            We’ve also taken to snacking on sugar cane over the last couple days. Larry cut a few large stalks for us and showed us how to peel it with a machete. It tastes sweet, more or less how you would imagine, but it does have a more refreshing quality than you would expect from something so sweet. Larry is also making Joel, Alex and I hammocks. He makes them professionally and can crank one out it about 2-3 days. We’ve been using one of his throughout our trip, and it’s quite nice. Plus, he’s going to stitch each of our names into our respective hammocks. Fortunately we diagramed it out with him though because he was originally going to spell my name “Netd,” –though perhaps it would have made for a better story that way.

8/18/09 4:49 pm:

            Well, we’ve been back in Puerto for about a week, but there hasn’t been a whole lot happening. We were scheduled for another home stay through the NGO we were working with, Caritas, but after the difficulties we experienced with them we’ve decided to change our plans. We also discovered our data was being distorted by the fact that they were only showing us (and may only be supporting for religious reasons) the wealthiest farmers in the area. So right now we’re doing more menial things like budgeting and data entry while we’re trying to rework our last few weeks to be as productive as possible despite probably staying chiefly in Puerto Maldonado.

            While we’ve been here though, I have gotten the chance to meet a lot of the other non-Stanford volunteers working with Fauna Forever. The herpetology team comprised of three guys from England and South Africa have been particularly fun to hang out with. We’re about to have a BBQ tonight as a send off for one of them. We’ve also been hanging out with Iona again, the Yale PhD student, who is back for a few days. Last night we also blended our own drinks made from Maracuyá (passionfruit), Cachaça, a local liquor made from sugar cane that’s hard to describe, but something like tequila, sugar, and with an egg white thrown in for a frothy texture. It was pretty good for a first try, though your last sip was always full of seed fragments. We’ll have to find a strainer.