Youth Group Closing Session

As I noted before, the goodbyes have already begun. Last week, the practicantes* finished their work and headed back to Lima to defend their theses. Since Karla, the practicante who has helped with the youth group all year, was leaving we held the official end of the year session for the youth group.

Praying for Rain

In Boston, weather affects the quality of your day. But a spell of bad weather one month is unlikely to affect your entire year. That's the difference between city-dwellers and farmers. For us city dwellers weather affects our outfits. For farmers, weather affects everything.

In September, everyone planted their fields with corn. The corn stalks have since sprouted and grown. In some places they are taller than I am. They're still green, for now. I say for now because it hasn't rained in a long time. People are starting to worry. Herman Rosario says that all the corn in Juliaca (a few hours away) is dry and yellow and useless. People will lose a lot of money if it doesn't rain soon.

Thanksgiving

The feast isn't until Thursday, but we celebrated with our Peruvian and Spanish friends on Sunday. Here's some pictures, and a beautiful blessing that captures the spirit of Thanksgiving.

Noted With Translation - What the Cool Kids Eat

Cool Rice

You're Invited

Sunday, November 20th

2PM, in the Mountain House

Thanksgiving Dinner

Belleza por Todos Lados - Perfectly Baked Good

Señor de Qoyllurritti - A Pilgrim's Journal

The test of this post is a (slightly edited) transcription of  my journal entries for the pilgrimage to Señor de Qoyllurritti. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully explain the pilgrimage, at least not without making it many more times. But I hope this will give you a sense of the whole thing in all its music and dancing.

The image of Señor de Qoyllurritti

The Camp

Noted with Translation: How to Die Edition

If you have to die, you have to die eating!

Quarterly Review 5 - Video

It helps, now and then, to step back

and take the long view.

-Prayer Honoring Pd. Oscar Romero

Yesterday was the first Quarterly Review of my second year. I'm sure you were all quivering with anticipation, and have reread my wise reflection many times, memorizing the most eloquent passages.*

But on the off chance that you aren't into reading reflections upon a life experience you've never had, I've got something else for you. Something new and multi-media.**

It's a video! And by video I mean fancy slideshow of pictures with 11 seconds of a video of people dancing that you saw already. Many of the pictures you'll recognize from old posts (or from my sister's facebook), but there's some new things as well. Here's my step back, my long view of the last three months.

The idea is to give a visual overview of significant moments of the past three months. I picked “On Top of the World” by Imagine Dragons for two reasons. 

1. In the last three months I climbed Salkantay pass with Kevin, putting us both as high above sea level as we'd ever been.***  
2. Receiving visits from Mom, Dad, Nora, and Kevin had me feeling like I was on top of the world.

Photo credits to Nora Hill, Rachel Krofcheck, a Spanish tourist at Macchu Picchu, the waitress at the fish farm restaurant, and me.

Events shown in this video:

Simple Living in Ocongate

I'm back in Ocongate teaching a basic English class at the academic summer camp the Ocongate parish is running. Once again that means less access to the internet, so less regular blog posts, but I'm drafting stuff on my computer so hopefully there'll be a reasonable amount of stuff going up this month. I'll be here until the 19th of February.

Right now I'm thinking about the value of Simple Living in relation to life in Ocongate. I think that the time spent here is some of the simplest living in the Andahuaylillas JV experience. The house we stay in has just the basics. There's no microwave or quick-heating electric kettle. Even making tea takes at least 10 minutes on the weak stove. There's no DVD player which means no movie watching (which is a popular pasttime in the Mountain House). So there's not much to do at night besides read, play a card game, or do a puzzle. Rachel and I are doing all three.

On top of the house situation is the food. All our food is provided by the parish. I eat with the students for every meal (breakfast, morning snack, lunch, dinner). In Andahuaylillas, I'm used to eating whatever is served to me at lunchtime on weekdays, but I make my own breakfast and we share the responsibility of making dinner. Here I have no say in any of the food I eat. That's a good thing. It makes the food less of a focus and the company at the table more important. It encourages the humility needed to accept a plate of food that you don't like because you know there's no other option.*

Part of Simple Living is accepting what comes to you. There's a quote on the wall in the Mountain House that reads "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you in life." Nowhere is the practice of that more obvious than here in Ocongate.

*Not even my parents' standard "If you don't like it, you can always make yourself a PB&J."

JV Life - The Chancho bucket

JVs tend to be save-the-world types, trying to do everything they can to make the world better and not mess anything else up. So naturally, many of them feel an urge to compost.

But here in the Mountain House, composting would be a bad idea. A compost heap in our tiny patio would smell, and that smell would climb up through my bedroom window and make my nightly time to ignore the world a less pleasant experience. Plus, we wouldn't have anything to do with the dirt anyways. We have flower bed, but they get almost no sunlight so we don't actually grow anything in them.

The solution is to look to local culture and see what people here do with vegetable scraps. They feed them to livestock. Some people have guinea pigs, some people have chickens. The school has dogs that  eat my lunch when it's got things like tripe* in it. We don't have livestock, but we live in a farming town so there's plenty of animals around. We give our scraps to our friend's chancho. Chancho is Quechua for pig. Somehow it's a word that survived the arrival of the Spanish (the Spanish for pig is cerdo).** As far as I know, it's only a Peruvian word. So don't go to your Mexican restaurant and ask for chancho tacos.

The WHO and the JV diet

WHO Meat guidelines

The WHO freaked a lot of people out last week. I'm not one of them.

That's partly because I understand how percentages work. But it's also because I eat so little meat. I've mentioned before how little meat we eat. Without really trying, we're following Michael Pollan's 3 basic guidelines for people who want to eat healthy.

1. Eat food
2. Mostly plants
3. Not too much

DISCLAIMER: The following discussion of how Mountain House JVs' diets relates to Michael Pollan's diet guidelines is not based on my having read his book, In Defense of Food. My father read the book. But, as anyone who has had dinner with him knows, he's an excellent explainer. He's like a human cliff notes. So I feel like I got the key points down.

Making Bread

I haven't been able to get online most of this week. There was another fire on a different mountain, the mountain where all the antennas are - so there was no internet anywhere for awhile. Thankfully this week's fire wasn't as big as the one on Qoriorko, and the internet is running smoothly (or as smoothly as it runs here) once again.

Last weekend was a packed weekend. It was all saint's day, día de la canción criolla, Halloween, and day of the dead. One of the traditions for the weekend is for kids to make special breads. The girls make pan wawa (baby bread) and the boys make pan caballo (horse bread). Afterwards I think they just eat it. Offerings for the dead are usually different foods.

I was invited by Mari and Bobby to join their family* at the oven for bread making. It was a joy to step inside the work room and see a long wooden table covered in flour, a stand mixer sitting in the corner with bits of dough stuck to the sides, and small chunks of bread dough sitting on the table waiting to be shaped. Maybe I was thousands of miles away from 27 Corinth Street, but I was right at home. I washed my hands and got to work patting the chunks of dough into flat circles to make the round single serving bread typical to the Andes.

There was also the nice surprise of seeing Sra. Estella. She's the head of the kitchen at the parish, so I see her most days, but I don't see her outside of work all that often. Bobby is her son, so she was there overseeing her children, grandchildren, and daughter-in-law as they shaped their various breads.

The breads came out delicious, and Bobby filled a small plastic bag with breads for the Mountain House. It was a wonderful day with my favorite family in Andahuaylillas.

More pictures after the jump.

 *This is the family I talked about in my last Quarterly Review

Día de la Canción Criolla

Sorry you highness, Jack the Pumpkin King, this isn't Halloween. It's the Creole song day in Peru. Criolla (creole) culture in Peru has a heavy Spanish influence (the criollos were Spanish descended natives of Peru). It's most present in the coast. Don't tell anyone here in the sierra this, but I think that the criolla food is the best in Peru. 

If you're interested, you can celebrate el día del a canción criolla by listening to DJ Gian's (pronounced "John") mix of criolla songs from last year. Maybe it'll inspire you to whip up a delicious plate of adobo.

Noted with Translation - Grandparents' House Rules

For a constant supply of sugary cereal, jelly beans, grilled cheese sandwiches, pineapple, ice cream for breakfast, and so much more. this post is dedicated to my two favorite Anns.

Rules of...
Grandparents' House
The kitchen is open 24 hours a day
Dessert is first

Parents not allowed

Play whenever you want

Welcome to pijama parties

Cookies for breakfast

Tell stories

Bedtime is negotiable

What happens here

STAYS HERE

My quinua eating habits

Having discussed the ethics of consuming quinua in the US/UK yesterday, I thought it would make

sense to talk about the reality of eating quinua in Andahuaylillas.

Quinua is a fantastically cheap protein here. It costs 7 soles a kilo. In Tacna (the other JVC site which is on the coast) it costs 16 soles. It's so much cheaper here because quinua is produced here. I don't mean it's produced here the way that people in Massachusetts can say “cranberries are produced here.” I mean quinua is grown right here in this valley. The picture of quinoa to the right was taken less than a mile from our house. So quinua is cheap because people here in Andahuaylillas grow it.

Quinoa and Food Justice

You've probably heard of Quinoa. Maybe one of your earthy-crunchy friends told you about it. Or maybe you're the earthy-crunchy friend who buys it at Whole Foods. Even if you don't know Spanish, you probably know that it's pronounced “keen-wa” and not “kwin-oh-ah.” It's a big hit with lots of people for all sorts of reasons. It's gluten free, which is a big plus if you have Celiac's disease. It's a complete protein, which is good news for vegetarians, and fantastic news for vegans.* And it's from South America, which automatically makes you more cultured if you eat it.

There's so many plusses about quinoa, it's almost too good to be true. And in the last two years, a number of media sources have pushed the idea that eating quinoa may actually be evil.

Stone Oven Pizza

This is also old news at this point. Our friend María, a Spaniard who started as a volunteer and now works full time for the parish in Andahuaylillas, has a stone oven in her backyard. Last month we got together one weekend and tried making pizza in the oven. Unfortunately the bottom of the oven isn't flat, so the first two pizzas got wrecked when we tried to slide them out on the peel. We wised up and baked the other two on trays. 

Baking in this oven was tough because none of us have ever worked with a wood-fired oven before. You can't just set the temperature and wait, you have to constantly monitor it. We still have lots to learn before we can do it well.

The view from María's backyard

Pro-baker Victor hard at work.

These two pizzas looked more like calzones by the time we got them out of the oven.

Volunteers in the White City

ReO/DisO was held in the costal town Mejía. To get there, we had to go through Arequipa “la ciudad blanca” (the white city). It's a city that definitely deserves its nickname. Check out the pics from both Arequipa and Mejia after the jump.

Happy Belated Birthday Erin

Erin's Birthday was in early September. But I fell way behind on blogging last month, so the pictures are only just going up today. We had a fun night with the entire volunteer community of Andahuaylillas, plus Billy. We celebrated in style with mustaches, and two kinds of cake.