The mototaxi turned the corner and my aqua blue house stood out sharply behind the trees on top of its little hill. Well here goes nothing, I thought. I dug into my backpack for a five soles coin to pay the driver. He came to a stop at the bottom of the grassy hill without my saying anything. Apparently everyone already knew where the gringa lived.
(Picture of my house on top of the hill - just imagine a downpour for the day I moved in)
“Más arriba.” I shouted at him over the clicking of hard rain on the plastic covering of the mototaxi. I wanted to walk up the path by our chacra (farm) – word had it that it was shorter.
“Ya, aqui.” I told him and we stopped at the bottom of our farm, my house tucked up the steep muddy path, past the pig shelters and the farmland, behind some trees. I had no idea how I was going to carry all of my crap up the hill by myself, so I started by paying the mototaxi driver.
Barbara had told me that one of the things I will learn is how willfully helpful everyone is. I had also learned during field-based training that before you walk up to a house, you should call from a good distance away so they know you are coming, and so they can manage whatever dog might attack you. I decided to put all of this knowledge to good use, and as I slung my camping pack onto my back, yelled, “Celina!” as loud as I could towards the house. I heaved my giant ice blue duffle bag over one shoulder, and yelled another, slightly more strained, “Celina!” up the hill. I grabbed my surprisingly heavy orange bag I’d been using as a purse and my regular backpack, thanked the mototaxi driver, and started the climb up the slippery and muddy path, bellowing, “Celina!” whenever I could spare the oxygen.
I was about a third of the way up, already puffing and sliding everywhere in the mud when Celina finally appeared at the top of the path. She came bustling down in her baseball hat, cardigan, pencil-like skirt, and big black rainboots. I took a couple more steps and then just waited for her to get to me. We exchanged a quick kiss on the cheek in greeting, and I exhaled a few words of hello before she took my backpack and little bag and headed back up the little hill.
When we walked into the big room they had divided to make my room, there were two women sitting on benches. I dropped my wet bags on the floor and greeted them. It’s always a little off-putting when you get someone who spends more time in bigger towns in the same place as a really “campo” woman. Campo means, basically, rural. One woman was wearing a pair of jeans and a sweater, sneakers, had her dark black hair pulled back in a messy bun, and was probably around 30 years old. The other woman had a skirt and slip on, she wore typical campo sandals, which are made out of tires, and her feet were caked in mud. She had four front teeth, all of gold that stuck out a little further than her lip could stretch to cover them. She was wearing a cardigan and had white hair braided down her back, mostly covered by her campo hat.
Campo hats are very common in the mountains in Cajamarca, and are a sign of status. The taller your hat, the higher your status. They are a strange cross between a cowboy hat and a wide brimmed sun hat and for whatever reason are outrageously expensive.
(This photo is an example of what a campo hat looks like)
I sat and chatted with the women a bit, then sat there politely when they started talking too fast for me to understand. I was politely turning my head to each person as they talked and providing the appropriate facial expression based on the inflexions that I heard, when the really campo woman started to cry. I had no idea what I had missed or why she was crying, so I looked concerned and sympathetic and tried not to look too alarmed. It wasn’t too long before she started cackling about something and the tension diffused. I took this opportunity to get up and take a glance at my room. Obviously, given my earlier response to hearing how small my room was going to be, I was dreading this moment and also hoping for the best. I walked around the wooden divide into my still door-less doorframe and took a peak – first response? It’s not unlivable, and with appropriate nesting, I can make it work.
There was the same small, bare wooden bed frame and little bedside table as before, the window was still not a window, and the walls were the same dead eggshell color with dark red trim as the large room. Everything was the same as before, except there was a single bulb that had been wired across the ceiling, a tiny single outlet had been wired across my wall, and there was a huge chunk simply cut out of my ceiling, leaving me with a clear view into the attic. What the hell did they do that for? I walked over to stand below it and was a little freaked out when I remembered that my host grandfather lives on the second floor. Built in peep-hole? Well, I would get to that eventually, maybe buy a piece of fabric to put over it?
My host mom interrupted my thoughts by walking into the room and asking me what I thought of my room. “It’s good.” I said. She walked around it once and then pointed out the light in the ceiling and the outlet on the wall. I was excited there was light and an outlet and I made it clear that I was pleased. The campo woman walked into the room also and we all stood there, looking at my tiny space. “I’m going to need to get a different bed.” I told her, “I am very tall and the bed is short, I’ll need to go to Chota to buy it sometime soon.” Apparently, my host dad could extend the bed for me – well that would save me some money and hassle on a bed frame. In the end, I found out that the hole in my ceiling was to give me more light in my room, and that they had a mattress for my bed, but would help me buy a new one when Samuel, my host dad, extended it.
We walked to the front of the house and my host mom climbed up to the second floor, reappearing heaving a tiny mattress that was apparently really heavy. She leaned it over the side of the railing to Griseria, the campo lady, and me. When the mattress was in range of my nose, I started coughing, the thick musk of an old straw mattress caught in my throat. I was not particularly excited about sleeping on the rock-hard mattress, but it was better than cement floor.
We heaved the mattress onto my bed and then they helped me take all the strange stuff off my walls, including a dust covered giant bear they had nailed to the wall. After that, they left me alone, probably headed toward the kitchen to get dinner going. I brought a few bags into my room and then looked around. I unpacked a couple things, just to start feeling more at home. Mom always told me that to feel at home, the first thing you need to do is make your bed, so I pulled out my sleeping bag and laid it out on my bed…ok…bed made.
(This is a photo of my room during my initial site visit. They have now since put up a wooden wall that goes just about a foot or so from where that bedside table is with the door frame on the far left.)
I managed to find my tape measure, and promptly measured every surface of my room and drew it to scale on a piece of paper. My room ended up being about 220 cm by 350 cm, including the width of my empty door frame. I measured my bed and the table and played around with where I should put it. I ultimately decided that it would go in the far corner of the room, away from my door frame, so I could have some privacy while I slept. I moved my bed across the room and began unpacking other things, little by little. Given the intense mud and rain outside, I decided to make the rainboots I had bought more comfortable, and set to work rolling the tops over so they would actually fit my calves. I also decided I would use them as my latrine shoes, because I had little faith in my ability to aim and my latrine is shaped like a key hole...makes things difficult. I also decided that these boots were never going to enter my room. I pulled out my surge protector/stabilizer and tried plugging it into my outlet so I could have some music, but the outlet didn’t work. I tried the stabilizer in the other room, and it didn’t work there either. I was called for dinner and left my stabilizer sitting powerless on the table.
Sitting at the dinner table, I was chatting happily with my host mom, when she told me that she was headed out the next day to Chiclayo, a city on the coast about 10 hours away. Apparently her mom was really sick and needed to get medical care there. I was a little surprised to hear that she had a mother, because her father lived with us and divorce is not a common thing. I’m still not sure what the story is about that… Anyway, she said she was leaving but her cousin, Griseria, the campo woman I’d met that day, was going to come to cook and be at the house. She told me that Griseria had an 18-year-old daughter also, and when I asked what her cousin’s daughter’s name was, she couldn’t remember. She looked pretty embarrassed, and then mentioned that she only had a primary education. This has happened a lot, that my host mom can’t remember people’s names that she sees a lot or are part of her family. It really surprises me sometimes, especially because she always mentions her low level of education, but I always brush it off quickly because I can tell she’s embarrassed.
I mentioned the outlet issue to her and she told Samuel when he walked into the kitchen. He went right out to fix it, but ended up only fixing the outlet outside of my room. After dinner Celina came in to my room to ask if Samuel could put something over the big hole in my ceiling and I happily allowed him to enter. At this point, I had swept my floors maybe 3 times, and as he nailed a clear plastic sheet over the hole in my ceiling, little pieces of adobe falling to the floor, I went to get the broom again. Apparently the plastic sheet is temporary, but I can’t imagine what they plan to replace it with. My host mom brought in a small blanket for me to use as a pillow, and then said goodnight.
(this is a photo of my super ghetto "skylight")
A little while later, Kate and Diamond called to see how site was and how I was doing. I told them it was not as bad as I thought, and that waiting to get to site was definitely way worse than actually getting there. We made a plan for me to go back into Chota the next day and they would help me do some shopping for things I needed. Number one on my list at that moment was a pee bucket. There was no way I was going to be walking out there late at night, in the rain and freezing cold to pee into a latrine I could barely aim into in the daylight. I asked Barbara if you get better at aiming...she said no.
I swept out my room again, then put on my sweatpants, smartwool socks, a tshirt, and my sweatshirt, and crawled into my sleeping bag to watch a movie. Wow was that straw mattress hard. I felt like I was sleeping on cement, and it smelled so musty I was worried there might be mold in it. I was really tired, though, and figured it would probably be good for my back. I went to stretch my body out, still stiff from the night’s sleep on a bus, when I realized I literally could not stretch out my body, the bed was much shorter than I was, about half a foot too short. I curled my legs up in my sleeping bag – guess it was going to be a fetal position night. As I watched my movie, the cold seemed to settle over me like a blanket, and before long I was shaking. I got out of my sleeping bag and fumbled around in my bags. I found a pair of thick leggings and another pair of wool socks and pulled them on quickly, teeth chattering, and jumped back in my sleeping bag. Didn’t help at all. I jumped back out of bed, found a fleece shirt and my big, thick Northface fleece, gloves, and a hat and bundled up. By the time I was ready to get back in bed, I had on one pair of smarwool socks and a pair of long alpaca socks, thick leggings and sweatpants, a tshirt, a fleece shirt, a sweatshirt, and my Northface fleece, a thick alpaca hat with my hood pulled on over it, and a pair of wool gloves. I was so thickly bundled up that I couldn’t zip my sleeping bag. I lay in bed, curled in the fetal position on my hard, musty straw mattress, and shook until I fell asleep.
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