Hojas de Coca

I had a coca leaf reading done yesterday. It was really interesting--almost eerie--experience, but I am definitely glad I did it. The way it works is you go to the house of the curandero (or shaman, although that name is usually reserved for amazonian healers) and sit for a while while waiting for your turn. The one I went to was very popular so I was waiting for quite a while (close to 2-3 hours!). This curandero is really famous apparently so he gets payed to go to Europe, the US, and all over south america to see his patients. Making him not only good curandero, but a man with interesting stories.

To exemplify his popularity I can vouch that while I was in the "waiting room" I overheard that two russians were calling ahead asking for an appointment a month in advance. Not your everyday curandero. Now, I say "waiting room" but I must clarify what I mean. I do not mean a cozy room with comfy chairs inside the house but wooden banks in the backyard of the curandero´s farm. Being a prosperous man (the curandero), I was thus accompanied by four dogs (two of which were mischevious puppies), 4 chicken, 1 rooster, 1 turkey, tons of guinea pigs--cuy--, and I was even granted the pleasure of the company and the smell of a bull and two cows. (Thankfully, they came in only much later in the day.) Weird as it may sound, it was very cool...and I have to admit the animals provided hours of entertainment; especially the puppies who were learning slowly what it meant to be part of a dog family, the hard way. (I.e. Never eat from mommie and daddies plate or they will bark and bite you and don´t try to kill and eat your owner´s baby cuy or the head of the house will chase you with a broom.)

Finally, after hours of waiting, I was admitted at dusk into the vapor filled curandero´s room with my friend Ravi. Everything inside was chaotic to my eyes, though I was aware that everything was exactly as it should be nevertheless. Flowers scattered on the side, different purging instruments scattered about the room, an open wine bottle (half drunk by now) on the right corner of the room, and a tiny desk with thousands of coca leaves scattered in no pattern readable to my eyes. "Who will go first?" asked the curandero without any other introduction. I volunteered and sat down in a bank.

The curandero took a handful of coca leaves, smooshed them into his two hands, then asked me to blow on them three times. I did. Then he asked my name. I told him. And thus he proceeded to scatter the leaves around the desk and read the pattern in order to tell me my future. (Oddly enough, I hadn´t asked to have my future read, but la suerte and bodily health are intimately tied in Andean culture...so I should have known better). I have no idea how he read the leaves, to be quite honest. He seemed to see how they fall and immediately tell me where I am from, what I am doing here, what my personality is like (and all this somewhat accurately), and then reading my future. (It was all hard to hear though, he had a slight slur in his voice thanks to all the alcohol. In andean medicine, I´ve heard, you are supposed to drink a bit of wine before and after each cosultation to avoid being infected by whatever plagues your patients. ) At this point I got really nervous and asked that I just wanted to know about my health. He looked confused but continued uniterrumpedly to tell me exactly what I had at the moment and offer me a cure. Funny too, because his advice is actually pretty scientifically sound too.

He didn´t stop there. Although I had asked that I did not want my future read, he eventually smoothed back into it and I had not much choice but listen and be mistified by the whole process. It is not that I believe that he saw my future, but that I was struck at how accurately he was describing me accomplishing some of my very personal goals without me telling him anything except my name. I don´t pretend to understand this process, or would I necessarily recommend it as a form of treatment, but I have learned enough to admire the art and the complexity of curanderismo. This is not something you learn in a week, or something you try to bogus your way through. You have to have eight years of training at the very least, and there is something to that. Also, while sitting in the waiting room, I saw that this was not just an "interesting experience" for most of his patients (as it kind of was to me) but something extremely real. Even my guide (who looked like a very westernized Andean with her red-dyed hair and down jacket) was excited about getting her consultation. She had explained that this is why she was willing take me in fact; she was due for a consultation right now anyways. And, if you think about it, I had to wait for this consultation about as long as a patient has to wait for a doctor´s consultation (2-3 hours or more). It parallels here very closely.

Picking up from my long digression, after the curandero--Martín--finished the consultation he looked oddly at me for a while with a puzzled look. He then smiled and my turn was over. Ravi then went and had a similar experience. At the end of the whole thing, he talked to us both for a while and seemed to start to take a liking to us. He said to us both (paraphrased) "I know your studies will go well, I hope that you enjoy Peru and that you found what you were looking for." Nevertheless, when the time came to say goodbye, he turned around in a mystic sort of daze, stared at the wall and we both decided that this meant it was time for us to leave and give him our small donation. That was my experience with coca leaf readings with a curandero in a remote town with no paved roads, 1 hour away from Cusco. I probably screwed up some of the details, and added a bit of bias from my westernized perspective, but this is how I felt I experienced it.

In Cusco

Hey,
So after rushing desperately for the last few days to photocopy all the things i could possibly ever need, I am now finally essentially all done and enjoying Cusco (or Cuzco, or Qus´co however you like to spell Quechua words). It´s incredibly beautiful. I just arrived today and am working on developing the schedule for the next few weekends. We have essentially everything planned. Our main thing is that we are going whitewater rafting down the sacred valley for two days (it is essentially impossible to do the Inca trail without bookng two months in advance apparently, at least in this season) and then going to machupichu and staying there for a night! I am extremely psyched. I will also be taking a bunch of city tours in between. And in a few minutes we´ll be heading up to Huazao (think "wassup" to remember the name), a town for curanderos here in Cusco. I am looking forward to witnessing some hoja de coca reading sessions and see how the whole process goes. I know that these curanderos are probably are used to tourists and will make a whole show of it, but i´ll have to take what I can get. Well I need to head out right now. Later I will right more when I find a computer with a decent keyboard (the keys stick BADLY in the one in this café).

Chao.

Back and well again

Hey! I´ve been meaning to write a ncie long blog about my trip to Ayacucho because it was absolutely incredible. Unfortunately, right at the very end of my trip last monday morning I got awfully sick, to the point that I was basically bed-ridden for two days and am still feeling the remnants of it today. I have no idea what it was: Was it the cuy that I ate (guinea pig, a particularly important cuisine of the Andes)? Was it a cold? Or was it sorroche (altitude sickness)? Well, I can cross out altitude sickness, cause that should have been cured as soon as I got to Lima, which did not happen.

Anyways, don´t feel too bad for me. While being bed ridden I read all of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince non-stop for two days. Haha! So I was happy nevertheless (the ending did not lift my spirits too much though...when I finished I felt like I was in mourning for the rest of the day). Curiously, I ended up reading the british version since I could not find the american version down here. This means that I now know some interesting british slang words, like "snogging" (which apparently means "making out").

Besides reading of Harry Potter I have been mainly staying in this week, recuperating, and also reading the large number of fotocopies that I have gathered after visiting so many libraries. As a break, I meant today to give a detailed description of my trip to Ayacucho. But for that I think I need the (humility aside) incredible pictures that I took on the trip ( :-) ). I do have the pictures with me, but I was hoping that the internet cafe would have its own photo editing program so I can reduce the file size a bit and make them more suitable for internet viewing. Well, they don´t. So I will have to go home and do it with Microsoft Photo editor instead (a program which I hate, but it does the job ... sorta). So my trip to Ayacucho will have to wait just a few more days. I am really sorry. Thankfully, since not too much has happened since, I don´t feel too guilty postponing this blog a little haha.

Write back later. I will also write an update soon about how I am planning to go sand boarding this weekend around the dunes of the Peruvian desert! Yeah!

Hey from Ayacucho

So I am in Ayacucho. This will be really quick since I am about to leave to go to a "peñas" around Ayacucho. These are famous peruvians live music night clubs. What makes them so unique is the fact they play Andean folk music, criollo music, and huayno. I've heard that they are awesome, and I am very excited. Supposedly the ones in Lima are really touristy but these are "real" (which I am guessing just means, it has less tourists and more locals). Ayacucho, for being such a small town, seems to have a very good night life. As soon as the sun sets I hear random fireworks going off and painting the sky. They don't seem to be premeditated as they happen at the most random times and without any pattern as far as I can see (this is sometimes to my embarassment, since when these fireworks catch me off guard I have a tendency to jump in alert ready to dive from whatever bomb is coming my way...understandably, this provides a lot of entertainment for the locals.) *Jumps* See! Another firework just went off!! I simply cannot get used to them.

Erm. Well, back to my point...the night life, so the night life here is pretty good. First of all, in the two out of the two nights that I have been here I have seen party-procession parades every night. I do not know what for, I can only assume they are religious holidays that somehow I, as a fellow Catholic, am not aware of. It's odd, I had been so bumbed that I wasn't coming during a religious holiday (this place is perfect for those times), yet I am seeing exactly what I imagined would happen during these days. I can only imagine how magnificient the major processions must be!

Anyway, gotta run. Got lots of pictures!

Getting ready for Ayacucho! Yay!

Hey everyone!
So this is going to be a very quick blog entry because I am sort of in a hurry and out of small pocket change to pay for the internet cafe. (It´s funny really, I only consider my pocket change as how much money I have. What´s in my wallet is often useless since only restaurants are willing to take my 50 soles bills. Even handing a 20 soles bill to a cab driver will make him grunt and moan in dissaproval). But, I just wanted to give an update. I got invited to a conference in Ayacucho--a nice little town in the central highlands of Peru--on what is called Intercultural Health here. It´s a new term that seems to only exist in Latin America as far as I can tell, but it means that they are trying to develop a relationship between Western health practices and indigenous health practices, thus making a new intercultural health system. The idea is relatively new still. In fact, there is technically no official definition yet, and people in the ministry told me they will e-mail me when they finally decide on one. Either way, they are making a whole conference about this undefined term in Ayacucho and I am so excited that I will be there. Plus, it looks like Ayacucho is a nice town. The architecture is supposed to be beautiful and it has the dubious record of having the most churches per square meter! (I´ve heard people saying that there is a total of 300 at least in the whole town...in other words, one per block!!). Not surprisingly, one of the more popular exports are beautiful palm-sized wooden churches made by craftsmen. Apparently, they will also weave a personalize rug made from real Llama wool at your request as well, apparently usually depicting some of the more painful history of struggle in Ayacucho. (At $300, as tempted as I might be, I think I will pass...but the idea is cool. The whole process also takes 3 months, so you´d have to get it DHLed home.)
So, I will be leaving on a tiny plane tomorrow morning (Friday 15) and coming back apparently on an even tinier plane on monday. This should be interesting! Eek. I am sure it will be fine though. The flight is only one hour. I should be pretty comfy as there won´t be a lot of people in the plane because this is not the high season for tourism at all for Ayacucho. That would be actually in "Semana Santa" (big surprise, considering the number of churches), where people need to book hotels days in advance. Currently, from what I read and have been told, there are so many open hostels and hotels in the area that no one bothers to book in advance. Apparently, this is the classic case of a town over-compensating for really high, short lived seasons. Competition must be hard right now for the poor hotels, I like to wonder how they mantain themselves out of peak season. But on the plus side for the tourist, accomodations are really cheap and nice, since they want to attract the most tourists *beams*
Alright I gotta go right now. I think I went over the pocket change I had. The manager won´t be too happy, I think he is going to have to give me change. *blushes* I´ll write again later, and I will try to write more consistently. I was pretty busy this week and barely had time to answer my e-mail every day!

Chao!

Research Finally in Progress! & Pictures Up!!

Silvia, a Naturista I met at a festival of Bolivian curanderos in Lima, posing for me in front of her kiosk/store.

Research is finally going really well for me. I was worried for a while that things seemed to be going really slow, but it´s all finally picking up! Three days ago, I went to the library at the National Institution of Public Health (INSP in spanish). Turns out that the National Institution of Traditional Medicine (INMETRA) had been dissolved and absorbed by this organization. The group is now the Centro Nacional de Salud Intercultural (or CENSI) and they are RIGHT next to the library. So, when I walked up to the librarian and told her that I was interested in intercultural health she excitedly told me to wait and hurried off to the offices next door. She came back, gave me a book that interested me and told me to wait. All of the sudden the director of CENSI comes up right next to me and greets me. She asks me what is my interest and inmediately finds the people that are working on similar things within the department. She left me again, and brought out two more people, Chela and Roberto, who have been working on traditional medicine since the organization was called INMETRA. They were really excited to hear that I was interested in their subject and have become a extremely valuable contact. They already have offered to let me accompany them to different provinces in Lima in order to find curanderos that might be interested in attending a conference they are organizing for the end of this month. This is incredible!!! This is absolutely perfect for my project.

Toward the end of the meeting, they also gave me the history of their organization, which proves to me what I already suspected: that the official stance on traditional medicine is actually declining rather than growing in Peru. (This is despite a rise in acceptance of traditional medicine among Limeños in general. Mention traditional medicine to anyone in Lima and he or she is sure to mention how wonderful some herbs they have tried are, or that they finally decided to try Ayahuasca therapy--a hallucigenic plant used by amazonian tribes to induce healing visions--and that it helped them a lot.) Apparently, the government is more interested in finding the active ingredients (or principios activos, in spanish) of certain herbs rather than trying to understand the cultural heritage and the more spiritual aspects of local medicine. Now that INMETRA became CENSI and they share a space with scientists, Chela reccounted major arguments between the researchers and the intercultural health promoters. Sometimes, these arguments escalate into shouting matches were the scientist will claim that CENSI is trying to make the country more backwards and hinder all their efforts to bring Peru into the modern world! Apparently, everyone in the department feels like they are walking in pins and needles now.

Anyway, after talking to them for hours, I went back home and came back the next day where I met with Chela once more. She eventually introduced me to an anthropology professor that works at CENSI called Carlos. He was extremely nice, and it turns out we are studying almost exactly the same thing (he in anthropology, and me in history though) so he immediately asked me if I wanted to see some real curanderos right then and there. He heard I had been studying Bolivian medicine so he took me to a fair going on this week on Bolivian traditional medicine. It was really cool, and I took lots of pictures. I wrote detailed explanations of each picture so I won´t waste too much space explaining myself here. Visit the following website and click on each picture to see the picture and read my comments (at the bottom of the picture...you´ll need to scroll a bit some times): http://www.flickr.com/photos/forsadospirito/sets/562121/ . It was incredible! I am planning to go back tomorrow early in the morning.

Well, those are the major things that are happening. Right now I am going to go out and enjoy this friday night in Barranco with fellow Harvard students here in Lima. Hehe :-) We are going to "discotear" (go club-hopping) tonight. Yay!

Here are a few more pictures, but make sure you click on the link above in order to see more.

Here is a picture of saintly-Christ figure in a traditional Andean altar. This is a great example of the syncretism among the campesinos between catholicism and the old Andean religion. Truly the old religion is still alive and flourishing.

Here is a picture of a curandero sorrounded by his herbs. Note the newspaper clipings in the back showing "scientific" studies that have proven how some of his plasnts work. He is definitely appealing to the mestizo crowd.

Note the picture of Jesus and the Cross. It´s interesting to see the syncretism here. Note that despite the fact that this flier is obviously very catholic, he offers "pago a la santa tierra." That means that he can offer a sacrifice and libations to the Mother Earth (a ethereal being called Wachamami) in order for you to plead your cause. The other things he offers are coca readings, liberation and cleaning of evil curses, change of luck, and a "call of the spirit" (although I´ve never heard of this before). In the bottom right of the picture you get to see the actual curandero having a conversation with a potential patient.

To see more click on this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/forsadospirito/sets/562121/

Limeños

I am so impressed by how nice people are here. My host family has taken on my research project as if it was their own and keeps giving me newspaper clippings about traditional medicine and names of people they are studying similar things as I am. Those clipping actually have been helping me develop ideas for possible topics. I also love the dinner and living room conversations that we keep having. We´ve talked about everything: travel, politics, medicine, books...
And yesterday, the family of one of my Mom´s friends that had never met me picked me up at my house for lunch and treated me as if I had always been part of the family. They took me everywhere: I got to each Chifa (chinese food but mixed with Peruvian ¨crillo¨food...VERY good!), got to meet more of the family members, a tour of the ¨Centro de Lima,¨ and finally visited Larco-Mar. Larco-Mar is extremely beautiful and I recommend it to anyone who comes to Lima. It is a shopping mall that looks like an open ampitheatre except it is filled with little crafts stores and nice little restaurants. It rests right on the rocks of the cliff that drops down into the beach, so you get a beautiful view of Lima´s shoreline. Even in the wintery and foggy Limeñan night, the view is incredible!! Overall, yesterday was incredible and I realize that I am very much falling for this city and the Limeñans. Tonight I will be going back to Larco-Mar to meet with a professor and I will be sure to bring a camera to take photos, though I am not sure how exactly I can frame the picture so you can see how beautiful it is.

Just Arrived to Lima!!

I just arrived to Lima yesterday in the morning. After dealing with a--very--delayed plane which kept me up through most of the night, I arrived to Lima, Peru close to 7 AM in the morning. (Originally I was supposed to arrive at 4 AM). A taxi driver from Taxi Seguro was waiting for me at the gates and took me to my ¨house¨ (poor guy must have been waiting so long for me). As we weaved in and out of the useless white lines that supposedly represent different lanes, I got my first glimpse of Lima: a foggy, cloudy, polluted, and cold city. This is not to say that I don´t like Lima, but its strength most definitely does not lie on its beauty but its strong history and its economic strength. Nevertheless, I am really excited to be here finally. It is incredible that after so much planning and so many problems I had to work out, I am finally here!

The woman who is housing me is really nice and immediately led me to my room, who (bless her) realized how tired I must feel and made sure I was comfortable as soon as I got in. I slept for like 30 minutes then was picked up by a friend of the family which wanted to give me a tour of Miraflores. The quick nap was enough for me to enjoy the tour. Miraflores is a bustling--err, suburb I guess, though that word does not quite capture what it is--which is safe and has everything you could possibly need. Three blocks from my house is an internet cafe which charges only 50 cents every 30 minutes. The computers even have copies of World of Warcraft (if I was so inclined, though I doubt I will use that here unless I am truly, truly bored) installed. Two blocks from the cafe is the Ovalo Gutierrez which has a giant supermarket which tops any supermarket I have ever seen even in the States. This place has everything and then some. Need a cell phone? Go to E. Wong´s? Need toys? Go to E. Wong´s? Need a pharmacy, a grocery store, a restaurant? You get the point. The supermarket is huge and beautiful too! The whole store is decorated with morrocan tiles, wooden floors, and even fountains in between some of the aisles. I have never seen such a place. It´s like a Target, except...erm, nice and not as cheap.

In the ¨ovalo¨ you will also find a McDonalds, a Fridays, a Chili´s (all quite expensive for Peruvian standards), an elegant Peruvian restaurant called La Bohemia, and a movie theater (12 soles, i.e. like 3 dollars, per movie). Nearby there are some cheaper restaurants with very good quality, original cuisine for 5-7 soles ($1.50-2) which I like a lot. My friend giving me the tour took me to one of these retaurants were I ate a baked empanada (Peruvians don´t fry it apparently) and a dessert whose name I cannot remember but it involved passion fruit mousse, creme of milk, and biscuits. It was very good.

After the tour a took a very long and needed nap and then woke up to my fellow housemates --two American girls who have been studying Spanish here--asking me if I wanted to go bar hopping with them. I said ¨sure¨ got dressed, ate dinner inside ¨home¨ (chicha morada as a drink, yellow mashed potatoes, and sausages) and left at about 11 to a Bar called Si Señor. Now this, was a little bit of a experience. Unfortunately for the girls, since they look very american being blonde and all and speak rudimentary spanish, had a hard time finding a taxi driver that would take them for a fair price. I was not much help since I did not know the area at all, unfortunately. Finally, 15 soles later between the four of us, we arrive to the bar, drank a local light beer called ¨Cristal¨and headed out to Barranco. Barranco is another ¨suburban¨area in Peru, except that it´s populated by bars, night clubs, and cevicherias. During the day, I imagine, it must be pretty nice since it is right next to the ocean. At night, though, it´s a clubbers heaven with thousands of clubs with no bouncers at all...in fact, instead of bouncers, the clubs pay people to accost you in the street and try to get you to come into their night club because it is the ¨best¨one in town. I didn´t stay very long though since I was very tired, so I called a cab after another beer and got home at 1:30 AM eager to go sleep.

Anyway, that was my day yesterday. Right now I am in an internet cafe wasting a bit of time before going back to E.Wong´s and getting some prepaid minutes for my cellphone. (I bought this cheap, refurbished phone and got a ¨prepago¨plan). I will eventually get the courage to take photos, though I still don´t feel confident enough where I can walk around with a camera without looking like such a tourist. For now, I´ll just write as much as I can. All of my entries might not be as detailed as this one--some more, some much much less--but I will try to be consistent with them nonetheless. I will be going every morning to this internet cafe to check my e-mail and update the blog. Check back soon and often!