Lost in Chakraland (April 4th, 2014)

Several months ago I texted the following message to a fellow volunteer:

“I should never leave with people from my town if I ever want to get back to my town.”

This last weekend that statement was put to the test and damn if it didn’t hold its own.

Every weekday I stop in my health post to see if there are any new meetings I should know about, or to see if there is anything I can be a general help with.  One morning, Don Aurelio, the head of my health post asks as I’m heading back to lunch if I would like to go to some of the caserios with him at 2:30.  Well, sure, why not?  I ask which ones we’re going to and he mentions, Huarac, the one closest to Huantar.

2:30 rolls around and we very promptly head out.  As we’re walking towards the cars I ask to which caserios exactly we’re going to and what exactly we’re doing.  Don Aurelio nows mentions Olayan, Succha, and Uranchacra, three of the caserios that are the furthest from Huantar.  And as for what we’re doing, all he says is “descapacidades.”* And all I can think is, “Wait, we’re untraining people?”  But I am nothing if not game, so off we go. 

We drive along and pass right by the caserio of Olayan, continuing on towards San Marcos.  Umm, wait, weren’t we planning to…Nope apparently not, apparently we are continuing onto San Marcos.

And now I’m going to rant a little bit about bureaucracy.  We are going to San Marcos, a forty or so minute drive from Huantar, because one of the men in the car has sliced with finger open with an electric saw.  That explains the unexplained blood bandage around his hand.  The specialist he needs to see is in Huari, an hour away from Huantar in the opposite direction.  But we go to San Marcos in order for Don Aurelio to register him for SIS, the Peruvian Medicaid, which he doesn’t have and cannot get treated with without.  And seeing as there hasn’t been internet in Huantar for the past week, they have to travel to San Marcos, closest city to Olayan, in order for him to get his finger stitched up in Hauri, now an hour and twenty minutes away.

Once the man’s insurance is insured (teehee), he heads off to Huari, where he will be treated at some point the next morning.  Don Aurelio and I head to Olayan.  It’s now 4:00 o’clock.  As we clamber up the mud-filled slopes of the shortcut, he explains that two days ago the head of the health network sent him paperwork to list all of the handicapped people in all of Huantar’s caserios.  Since going house to house was impractical (thank god we both on the same page for that one), we were going to search out the community leaders and ask them to help us fill out the sheets. 

Theoretically this is very good idea, but it turns out that locating community leaders can sometimes involve going door to door.  And when said community leader lives up the steepest goat track trail yet encountered by this volunteer, well then time is hardly saved at all. 

Eventually Señor Lucas is found and I gotta say, for being a community leader, the man was awfully useless.  Not knowing people’s DNIs I can understand (I certainly don’t know my neighbors SSN), but last names man, surely you know the last names?  By the time Don Aurelio and I start back down the goat track, and after he’s stopped to talk with just about every Tom, Dick, and Harry we pass on the street, its nigh 6 o’clock. (Although I can’t complain too much, I got to use my one Quechua joke on a group of people.  They asked if I spoke Quechua yet and I responded “Quechuata parlatsu,” aka “I don’t speak Quechua” but I said it in Quechua, so HA).  As we made our way back to the main road I tried to tell Don Aurelio that I didn’t think I could go on to Uranchacra and Succha with him.  Cars going up to Huantar are scarce things after 6 pm, and having not known that I would be wandering the countryside I hadn’t told my host mom that I would be coming home late—and due to the recent Cell-Service-Apocalypse 2014, I had no money to call her and let her know. 

But of course, “No te preocupes, vamos a Uranchacra primero y a Succha segundo para qué es más fácil encontrar carro.” [Don’t worry, we’ll go to Uranchacra first and Succha second so that it’s easier to find a car.]  Yeah, sure.  Whatever you say.  

We get off at Uranchacra as the sun sets and the night settles in.  We begin to walk up the nearest trail and I quickly call one of my fellow volunteers (thank you RPM—aka free minutes) and ask him to text my host mom and let her now that I am with Don Aurelio and will be back later than normal.  Soon after I hang up Don Aurelio points out the moon, a mere crescent this time of the month.

Well that’s just lovely, but I gotta admit that seeing the moon as I’m setting off towards a house I’ve never been to, along a trail that is slowly becoming a not-trail in a caserio a full hour hike down from home is not my prime viewing time.  And if we’re being real honest here, seeing as how dark as coming, I’d prefer a full one.

But my Spanish isn’t at that level yet, and sarcasm is not yet universal, so I stuck with “Si, que bonita.”

The trail soon does become a not trail and pretty soon we’re walking through farm plots and I’m trying to avoid stepping on the freshly sprouted plants with only my cell phone light to guide me.  Twice Don Aurelio doubles back, which does nothing but boost my confidence, and I begin to strategize how I would get us out of here if he slipped and hit his head in the next half hour or so (a helicopter with a rope ladder as the best I could come up with, seeing as how Lassie was nowhere to be found).  Eventually we find our way back to a trail, but even this one involves “shortcuts” to avoid sinking knee deep in mud.

At long last we make our way to house.  Twenty feet before it, now that the dark was fully settled, Don Aurelio turns to me and whispers, “Careful, I’m pretty sure there’s a dog here.”

Great, just great.

This house is in fact the house that we’re looking for, but lo and behold the people who live within in are in Lima—left just yesterday in fact.  No matter, Don Aurelio says, the remaining relatives can help us out.  So with the help of great-uncle and son we manage to get a decent list of the handicapped folk in Uranchacra, and son happily obliges us by “practicing” his father’s signature for the official document. 

We head out by borrowing one of the family’s flashlights and they point us in the direction of a trail to the main road.  We set off, walking on a gloriously wide trail marked by tire tracks—tire tracks, meaning that this trail undoubtedly leads directly to a road because that’s how cars and roads work!  But twenty steps into this trail, Don Aurelio shines his light to the left and sees another godforsaken patch of trodded down grass and suggests we follow it.

UGHHHHH.

We follow the “trail” to a steep drop-off, backtrack a bit and crawl under a barbed wire fence, and wind our way between a corn field and water reservoir, jump over a stream, and walk down a trail that at long last warrants the title of “path.”  It is however now 7:30 and there is a greater chance of hell freezing over than us encontrar-ing a car in Succha to take us up to Huantar.  During the intervals we have cell service, Don Aurelio uses my RPM to call his wife, who is in Huari with the man with the sliced finger, in order to see if she can try to help us arrange a ride.

Spoiler alert: That’d be a no.  No one from Huantar is willing to pick people up in the night.  Allow me a brief tangent.  About a month ago a 6-yr-old girl broke her upper arm in the playground.  They were charged 80 soles (more than my month’s rent) to be driven to the hospital in Huari.  It’s normally eight.

Finally we make it to the main road and what do we spy with our little eyes but a mototaxi.  Mototaxis come in many shapes and sizes and this mototaxi is like a motorcycle with two open-sided sidecars on the side.  After a brief negation on price, where the mototaxi owner didn’t budge because we had no other options and he knew it, we climbed aboard the thrirty sole mototaxi ride. 

As we zip along the pot-holed gravel road, I get a call from the volunteer who’d texted my host mom.  Apparently getting a text from an unknown number claiming that I was fine did not assuage her worries as much as I had hoped it would. She called him, and he in turn was calling to make sure that I had fallen off the side of the mountain.  Not yet I assured him.

I made a brief list as we wove our way up the mountain. Number of times the mototaxi stalled—3. Number of times I almost fell off of my what-can-be-best-described-as-a stool—4.  Number of times I had to remind myself that putting my foot down on the ground while in a moving vehicle was a really bad idea—too numerous to count.  I had an epiphany as we drove up.  Seatbelts are there to stop you from moving forward when the vehicle also stops.  I know this sounds obvious, that it is in fact obvious, but I had never quite realized it before.  Seatbelts protect you, seatbelts are good, wear your seatbelt, etc.  I got all that.  But the actual practical application and use of seatbelt had never before been so well-demonstrated to me before.  I get it now.  They’re really important.

In between the counting and epiphanizing I watched as the moon set behind the rising mountainsides and created a silver sunset.  I could see Orion to the northeast, and I realized that would most likely never quite see this sight ever again.  And it was lovely.

At long last we arrived in Huantar, and as I stepped off the mototaxi, Don Aurelio yelled out that I should meet him tomorrow at his house at 6 am so that we could finish up with the last two caserios.

And so began the new day.

Besos! 

*Spoiler: This means handicapped people, not untrained people.  

Post-script: The next day was largely uneventful but I would be remiss not to mention when Don Aurelio once again forsook the established and well-known trail for the goat trail that involved, and I swear I am not exaggerating, crawling over brambles and climbing up a short span of rock wall.