| Eventually, it's time to leave the sun and surf and jewelry-making traveler community of sun-splashed Mancora and head back on bumpy, twisting roads from the coastal deserts to the highlands of Cajamarca. | |
 II wonder if the rooster had to reserve a seat on the bus. |
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Mariska has organized a series of workshops to teach the teachers and provide a forum for ideas about working with children in rural schools. I attend a workshop on oral tradition run by a Peruvian named Alfredo. Alfredo gives a fascinating talk about the ways the Quechua-speaking people of the Andean highlands view life differently from we city folks. He says that in the countryside, the Quechua people we're working with have a concept of "give and give" rather than the Western concept of "I give you and you give me something in return". He also talks about the Quechua animist views, that everything lives and everything is a person - and this includes the plants, the air, the trees, even the rocks. He gives the example of a wall maker working silently with stones, finding a way to build them into a wall where each stone rests best. If the stones are not happy and at peace, the wall will fall. For these people who live off of and in harmony with the land, humans are a part of life, along with the cows and trees and rivers and rocks, and not at the center of life as we see ourselves. For the teachers at the workshop, this applies to grades and other forms of competition used in Western schooling that focus on the individual, concepts that may need to be changed when working in rural schools. Moving on to the concept of family, Alfredo explains we see family as Mom, Dad and the kids, while the Quechua people see family as this PLUS their cow, their chacra (farm), the trees, their chickens, and so on. Each is an equally important part of their family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, Mariska and I meander up the mountain to visit whichever friends we may meet. One girl we meet, a friend of Mariska's, is 13 or 14 years old and holds a 4-month old baby, her son. A child with a child. I find out later this is the result of her being raped by an ex-con who has since left the area. Big city problems are invading rural life. |
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 The girl we met with her child. |
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Later that afternoon, we make our way gingerly down a hillside to an inviting patch of grass next to a river. Pancha, a friend of Mariska's with a warm smile and lively eyes piercing through cabbage patch wrinkles, is there with three of her four children. The crops have been sown, and they are watching their cows, turkeys and teenage chickens. The children play with the chickens, tossing them in the air as though inviting the flightless birds to fly, and the chickens run back for more. I think back to what Alfredo said about family - the animals, Pancha and her children, their crops ... all make up their family.
When we finally stroll back into Cajamarca, we catch
a cab and a sheep joins us for the ride. |
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 Mariska and the sheep jockey for position. |
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