The plane from San Francisco, California to Lima, Peru leaves at the unusual hour of 1:20am. With stopovers in El Salvador and Costa Rica, it’s not exactly a direct flight, but it gives me a glimpse of Costa Rica’s jungle-clad mountains criss-crossed by muddy rivers that plunge precipitously over hidden waterfalls.

Mariska is a friend from New York who’s been running art workshops with indigenous children in rural Peru for the past four years. She’s full of energy and enthusiasm, a tall Dutch woman who towers over the Peruvians who are awaiting the arrival of friends and relatives at Lima’s international airport. It’s relaxing yet disconcerting to meet a friend in a foreign land – a familiar face and some good advice help ease the transition, yet the face seems so out of place in unfamiliar surroundings.
We take a crazy cab ride to her friend’s house, where I try to sleep for a few hours without much success, until we’re up at 3:30am to catch a flight to Cajamarca in the highlands of northern Peru. Out the plane window, the coastal desert rises through foothills and mountains to towering Andes peaks that stand alone, perpetually cloaked in snow.

Mariska stays in Cajamarca with the family of a friend of hers – an extended family living in an extended house, which seems to be a common living situation around here. It comes complete with a pig on the roof that eats the gloopy leftovers from the meals.

Mariska sizes up the pig on her roof, and the pig sizes up Mariska.

I find a hostel room down the road, exposed to the elements on the roof ... turns out the rain has drowned the door lock into submission, so I’m almost incarcerated in my abode. Next night, different room, same story – they actually have to break a window to open the door. Next night, an extremely non-soundproof room on the ground floor, more like a tomb with no natural light and a huge spider for a roommate. It comes complete with a blaring t.v. upstairs (must be a papier maché roof) and an all-night party next door. It’s mostly cool Peruvian music around here, but the younger crowd has a penchant for blasting all the latest hits from the 80’s at extreme volume. High school flashback. Aural privacy rarely, if ever, enters the picture as the smallest hiccup echoes down the cement halls and stairwells. It finally quiets down around 5:30am, just in time for the morning crew to start banging around. The next day, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, I crawl with my belongings to a room on the top floor of the hostel next door, where I find much-needed rest and a door lock that actually works.

A street in Cajamarca. Note the yellow 3-wheeled moto taxi and colonial architecture.

It’s quite a routine getting up to the schools where Mariska does her work. Up at 6, meet Mariska at 6:45, then we catch a combi (a group taxi) to the edge of town (I accidentally wrote “to the edge of time”, which also has meaning), where we meet the school teachers and wait for another combi that drives us up the mountain, along a bumpy dirt road, to the general vicinity of the rural schools. The first day we go to Corisorgona (other teachers continue on to schools farther up the mountain), where the children are having their first checkup of the year with doctors who rode up with us in the combi.

Mariska and I with the students of Corisorgona, a few of whom are holding masks they made in one of Mariska’s art classes. I’m the grinning gringo with the hat in the back row. Click here to contact Mariska Van Dalfsen and for more information about her art workshops and other programs with children in rural Peru (and to volunteer to help)

I entertain the kids with magic and juggling while they await their checkup. Many have raw cheeks from the biting mountain winds. The boys dress in what I guess you’d call “western” clothing, drab in comparison to the beautiful campesina dresses and hats that resemble cowboy hats that the girls wear. Talk about bright, creative use of color!

Women from Corisorgona spinning sheep wool into thread by hand.

The next day we take the combi farther up the mountain, then hike the final stretch (at an altitude of 10,000 feet, puff puff) to the 5-room schoolhouse of Chamis. The children’s first response to me is to run away screaming “Ay chi chin!” – I guess they’re not used to redheaded gringos. I sense I represent some character from some local legend to them. When school starts, they line up in neat rows, and two children from each grade 1-6 sing songs for Mariska and I. Most of the songs are from Cajamarca’s Carnival, all with the same melody but different (and often risqué) words. Two young boys sing a drinking song.

The students at Chamis line up for the start of their school day.

I dress up in full clown regalia and do a magic and juggling show for the entire school, and gradually they lose their fear of the one they call “payaso”, the Spanish word for “clown”.

The first graders at Chamis working on their paintings with a clown in their midst. No matter how much they smile, they inevitably put on a slightly pained expression as soon as the camera comes out. After seeing me perform, the students were given the assignment to draw me and to copy the words on the board, which translated read “The clown does magic tricks and makes jokes and I applauded him . I was happy, I was surprised and I was a bit scared.”

After the show, I help Mariska with her art workshops for the children. She gets art supplies and lugs them up the mountain, and gets the kids to paint and dance and write and work with sculpture. Whenever possible she uses local plants, earth, and recycled materials in the art projects. Most of the children have never held a paintbrush in their lives, but they take to them right away and their creative side shines through. It really opens them up. The rural classrooms have thick adobe walls, corrugated metal roofs and no electricity, so windows are the only source of light.

A Chamis student proudly smiles over her work of art. Her beautiful outfit, hat and all, is typical of the women and girls in the rural villages around Cajamarca.

 

Continue to: part 2 - Los Banos del Inca and Mancora. Part 3 - Back to Cajamarca Part 4 - Amazon Jungle Part 5 - Cuzco Part 6 - on the the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu Go to Payaso in India