Mind busting mobility

Tomorrow I’ll fly home, after five months of field work in Moro and the Rio Loco Valley. I’m feeling exactly the same as I did in the days before the airplane would take off in Zurich. I’m acting as it is socially expected, when you’re about to leave: I’m taking my leave from many people, I’m giving gifts, inviting to drinks, having a fare-well evening, cleaning up my room and my desk and so forth… Still, I feel strangely unaware of it all. In about 48 hours I’ll be 7500 km away from the chair and the desk on which I’m writing this post. The first days back there will be like a movie or something, like the first days here have been. Flying doesn’t provide our minds with the time to cope with all the changes that it bears. You board the plane, you sit inside a tube with small windows and wings and you get out somewhere else. Along with elevators and subways it’s surely the closest thing to Star Trek’s beaming.

Life’s an adventure

massive easter egg

click

Emigration tax

Perú is the only country I know that demands emigration taxes upon leaving the country. (Currently: USD 32.25)

Carap, 2.2.2007

Water driven stone mill in Carap

Round up

Time for a round up, it’s week four back in Moro and one week left for my departure back to good old Europe.

1. I’ve been thinking. Right, my written information here was scarce, but I was posting almost regularely, so I can go home with a good consciousness – But with the motivation to do it better in future. Hey, nobody’s a born foreign correspondent.

2. I’ve travelled to Lima for some matters, the second time so far. I don’t like the city and it seems nobody does. It’s big, raunchy megacity, miles of slum in the outskirts and super rich quarters downtown. Moro doesn’t look very different from the slums in Lima (Never been inside the slums, to be frank), but what makes things worse in Lima are the business buildings and golf clubs in San Isidro and other quarters. Moro’s state and the state of the villages I’ve been working in is sad and lamentable. The contrast in Lima is a scandal.

2. I’ve been sick, as most of my dear readers have guessed after my last post. An evil flu has taken over my body. For almost exactly a week now, I’ve spent at least 20 hours a day sleeping and sweating in bed. As always, it’s only my fault. Shouldn’t have gone up to Pisha on Friday and everything would have been nice, but, I would not have heard the remarkable news of point 3. It was worth the pain of being ill. And I’ve got a whole bunch of anti-flu recipes in my pocket I can pass on to my mates in Europa, when they happen to be ill.

3. Pisha has got a radio station! I met my friend Daniel “El Gringo” from Pichiú in Pisha, the village farther above in the valley who’s signed a contract with the municipality of Pamparomas to be the radio speaker of the newly established Radio Pisha.

The transmitter has got 50 Watt and would be reasonably strong, but they still need an antenna. The signal reaches Pichiú and Huascar so far – two neighbouring villages – The aim is to reach as far as Moro. If you’ve got an old radio antenna in your den and are willing to let it, let me know. Right now Daniel is working from 4AM to 8 AM and 6PM to 10PM, according to electricity schedule. The program includes music, greetings and messages for the whole valley. Bigger productions, such as interviews and news coverages are planned.

4. The ethnologik is out, everything’s about power this time. Unfortunately, an article about the regional elections written by my humble self didn’t make it, due to violation of a deadline, which I couldn’t keep due me being in the Atacama desert at the time. Anyway, It’s a great edition, go, buy, read, discuss and get wiser.

5. I’m getting on quite well with me research paper. I’m working out the disposition. I won’t start writing until I’ll be back in Europe. I know I’ll get stuck in the “Thanks to…” section anyway, so I can waste my time with that back home and not here.

Intercultural empathy

One of the most interesting sides – at home, as well as here in Peru – about having the flu are the many – very kind – tips and special recipes one gets by the folks around you. Imagine a standard dialogue: “Hi, anthronaut, how’s it going?” – “Honestly, quite bad, I’ve got a bad flu…”, bet something like If I was you, I would do this and that or You should do this and that will follow- And you can also bet your grandmother’s false teeth that your flu will puff away like a bad joke on a family dinner.

I made a list of the best ones:

“If I was in your place, I would:

1. Go and take a warm shower – not too hot – got to bed and afterwards you’re a newborn man.”
2. Cut some eucalyptus and make yourself an inhalation.”
3. Make a tea out from eucalyptus leaves. Take some sugar, pour alcohole on it and burn it up. Mix all and drink it hot. Go to bed.”
   
4. Make a tea from eucalyptus leaves, add some lemon and drink it hot. Go to bed.”
5. Take a glass of Pisco, mix with lemon juice, garlic juice and onion juice. Drink it, got to bed. [And probably die in agony.]
6. Dress up real warm, with a sweater and a coat and go for a run. Then take a shower and put on dry clothes. Afterwards you’re completely restored.”

Running packed up in winter clothes at 30 centigrades with your entire respiratory apparatus hanging out of your mouth is not what really I would like to do, eucalyptus tea with lemon was my choice. Makes you sweat more than all hot chicken soups of the world could dream about.

Money

At times I hate money

It’s money that makes money makes people that funny

Civilized men start to act gunny gunny

 
 
thanks, roots manuva

Ryszard Kapuściński (1935 – 2007)

Yesterday night, Ryszard Kapuściński, foreign correspondent, writer and philosopher has passed away in Warsaw, at the age of 65.The “The Polish Journalist of The Century”, has he’d been entitled in 1999, had got the talent of being in the right place, in the right moment. Many times he’s been the only European correspondent in crisis regions. His writing was less pure coverage than an essaystic and interpretative approach to understand foreign worlds and the colonial heritage Europe had left in Africa and Latin America.Being a Pole and thus coming from a dictatorship and as a correspondent working for a dictatorship he has offered us another approach for the understanding of such political systems. All his life he wasn’t satisfied just to “scratch the surface” – What Kapuściński has left us is a humanistic testimonial of a World History.

Moro, 17.1.2006

Cuy Gore