Va'os a Carmen

It is one thing to be told that Lima is in the middle of the desert: it is another thing entirely to experience it. This past weekend marked my first venture outside of Lima, and it took us over an hour just to leave the city itself, but once we did it was unmistakable. I casually glanced out the window and suddenly we were surrounded by looming mountains of sand that made our highway, a monument of human achievement, looked like a joke. What if the winds over the Pacific sneezed and disturbed these austere monstrosities, prompting them to suddenly engulf the Pan-American highway? Our humble gringo-bus didn't stand a chance. But this preliminary shock soon distilled into sheer and inescapable boredom, broken occasionally by clusterings of shanty towns. Whole communities were mere collections of colorfully painted sheet metal somehow assembled into single room shelters from the ceaseless sun and sand-laiden breeze. Here there is nothing, nothing at all apart from these meticulously organized boxes, streamers of barbed wire, and a Peruvian flag fluttering above it all, in the midst of interminable desert. Sobering.

One of the much larger shanty towns, which are called Pueblos nuevos. I couldn't get a good picture of one, since we were on a bus that was constantly moving, so this photo is courtesy of findtarget. The ones I saw probably had about 20-50 houses in all.

Our destination, Carmen, a small town in the province of Chincha, is one of the only living representations of Afro-Peruvian culture. Per the advice of Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish colonists had imported Africans during the colonial period for plantation work in order to spare the poor Indians from certain death. Renown as a veritable machine of human power, the African body evoked no such pity. After emancipation, the majority of the ex-slaves were genetically integrated into the rest of the population, but this community held on to their roots and traditions, surviving on farmland and plantations. Gigantic fields of cotton surround the town itself, and the house-hotel that we stayed in was tucked in the middle of a massive garden, primarily of avocados and lúcuma.

Lúcuma

Part of the farm

The resort itself was absolutely beautiful. Our program director, Laura (whom we call Lali and who is really more of a big sister to all of us than an administrative personnel) rented out the whole hotel for the fifteen of us. It was a lovely weekend of relaxation and respite from the bustle and smog of Lima.

As part of our cultural experience, we received a percussion lesson the cajón, a drum that the slaves created in defiance of the plantation owners' bans on musical instruments, singing and dancing.

It is simply a rectangular box, with a circular hole cut in the back, that you sit on and strike in a variety of ways to yield different timbres--a surprisingly difficult instrument to manage. A group of three school boys--about seven or eight years old--treated us to a couple songs they had prepared for us to showcase their cajón talents, and one even performed a gutsy solo on the recorder.

We also had an Afro-Peruvian dance lesson from a woman in her fifties with a bigger presence than all fifteen of us gringos combined. We all thought we were performing pretty well, all things considered, until towards the end she threw up her hands chuckled, "I give up, you guys are horrible at this, you're twenty year old hips are stiffer than my mothers'." After this we had an African tap dance lesson from two middle aged brothers and their younger cousin. This tap is distinct from what we know it as in the states: it is much heavier, there is a lot of stomping and the rest of the body is more involved. It is traditionally a men's dance--although the women have become more involved in recent years--that is practiced after Christmas with an extensive four day tap dance festival. After the lesson, the men invited us all to see their house in town, which had less in it than any house I have ever seen in the US, but the walls were completely plastered with framed pictures of their family.

The brothers were two of fifteen, most of whom are grown with families of their own, so there was a great deal of family to represent, and they proudly recounted stories of their father--a man who was famous on the national level for his fiddle talents. They ended the visit with an astounding cajón performance, the star of which was a tiny four year old girl, dressed in a hot pink two piece costume, who fearlessly danced in front of fifteen gringo strangers. Afterwords the brothers' wives came out and danced for us as well, and it was such a fun and beautiful performance that none of us could stop smiling for the entire night.
We also got to try a local liquor called tutumba (not sure if I'm spelling that right) which is made out of a fruit of the same name that only grows in the southern coastal region of Peru, and thus the drink can only be made there. Additionally, it only has a shelf life of three months, so it can't be exported or sold commercially. It was quite a treat: it tasted like honey and hardly burned the throat.

The next day we visited some nearby huacas, which are pyramid-like ruins from past Peruvian civilizations. They are scattered all over Peru, including several in the middle of Lima, one of which is right near my house.
When the Spanish encountered such ruins, they immediately put their own religious symbol, the cross, on the peak of the "heathen" religious monuments, to symbolize their conquest of the land and the superiority of their Catholic God.


 These particular huacas were surrounded by contemporary farmland, and we ended our trip with a visit to a local vineyard that made a delicious drink somewhere between a white wine and a liquor. The humble buildings were completely surrounded by beautiful flower gardens and cultivations of mangoes, avocados, lúcuma, and bananas. A variety of poultry wandered around the yard, looking at us curiously.

part of the colorful dooryard garden

The vineyard owner's house