Three articles written by Jodie Van Horn for the PAX 2100 Newsletter:

Article 1

By the time I changed planes in Florida I was already hearing the emotional tones of the Spanish language as the automated voice blared through the terminal, “Bienvenidos a Miami”, echoing the popular Will Smith song. Upon boarding the second plane, although still on U.S. territory, I felt that a border had already been crossed. I noticed that suddenly I was one of few with California-blonde hair and pale post-winter Scandinavian skin. I ordered some agua and settled in for the eight-hour ride that lay ahead, leaving everything familiar to trail behind me with the jet stream. The truth is that I had absolutely no image of what my eyes would behold upon landing in Lima. So I kept them closed and attempted to sleep away the anxiety, not to mention the exhaustion incurred from nearly fifteen hours of travel.

Lima’s airport spat me out into a sleeping city at 6:00am on a Wednesday morning. I immediately noticed the vehicle exhaust and way which the smog had cloaked the rapidly passing buildings. My mind paused for a moment to ponder pollution control, but it quickly moved on to absorb a dozen novelties that surrounded me. By noon that day the streets were busy with vendors, hundreds of honking taxis rivaling New York in noise and aggressiveness, and an occasional mother and daughter on a street corner selling Jesus icons. I was surprised by the congestion and vastness of the Peruvian capital, and although I did not have more than twenty-four hours to make a fair judgment, I was happy to head off to a greener part of the country.

Cusco was a pleasant contrast to the noisy city I had left behind on the coast. I was greeted by a group of musicians in traditional Andean garb, creating soft soprano melodies on reed instruments called sampoñas. There was no computerized voice to greet me seventeen times in five minutes. At nearly 12,000 feet I immediately felt a shortness of breath and general light-headedness. My knees wobbled inconspicuously beneath me as a hoped that I would promptly reunite with my luggage. A van sent by the NGO that I would soon be working for met me outside and chartered me off to discover my new home in the pueblo of Urubamba.

Urubamba is a town of nearly 18,000 inhabitants, cradled within the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Despite the population size, urban sprawl is not a part of the vocabulary. On the contrary, the streets are very narrow and the people appear to be packed into the town’s boundaries like the paper-wrapped strips in a package of gum. The shadows from a rim of towering green mountains, called cerros, remind the visitor that Urubamba lies in a protected nest where the Incas established their immense kingdom hundreds of years before. The only blemishes on the sprouting green mountainsides are an occasional political symbol charred into the surface or the zigzagged terracing that has made a steep geography traversable. A winded climb to the vista on top of one of these cerros quickly demonstrates just how sacred the below-lying valley actually is.

Along the cobblestone streets that make up perfectly symmetrical cuadros, or blocks, one encounters a wide variety of invasive sights and smells. The most dominant pedestrians are the dogs, which truly have a microcosmic community of their own. Day and night they forge the streets establishing territories, finding mates and hunting for food. The lack of a nightly street cleaner allows them to partition the streets with dozens of little territorial mounds, which one is wise to walk around. Besides the canine population, humans are nearly outnumbered by the abundant amount of loose livestock including hens, roosters, pigs, cows, donkeys, horses, sheep and the infamous Peruvian alpacas, a llama relative exploited for its warm and highly-solicited wool. The odors of Urubamba commonly blend together, but the air is usually dominated by the sweet and smoky smell of a wood oven roasting meat in preparation for a three-course meal, which will undoubtedly include white rice and potato. The third vegetarian component of nearly every Urubamban dish is choclo, a large-grained relative of corn, whose fields cover almost any surface that has not undergone urban development. Happily, this is a region where the green still vastly outspreads the gray.

This friendly, crowded town is now my home. As I sit on a bench beneath a huge advertisement for Coca Cola, which illustrates two indigenous people in colorful and traditional garb sharing a bottle of cola, I marvel at the subtle ways in which my own culture has infiltrated the Andes. The video stores are full of Hollywood movies dubbed with Spanish, and I often see Peruvian men and women wearing T-shirts with pictures of celebrities such as Kurt Cobain or displaying the insignia of some North American sports team. And yet, the distinct local flavor is rich. I am finding this to be a culture with a strong connection to the past and subtle longing for the progress of the future. The customs are widely shared and celebrated; bringing a feeling of solidarity that boldly contrasts the rigid individualism of the United States.

Now I join my Peruvian “family” at the table. The meal will start with a soup, followed by a hearty second dish that I will no doubt be too full to finish. The cheerful matriarch of the family, Mama Luz, will then attempt to serve me more until I have politely refused her offer at least five times. Everyone will be represented at the table, and we will discuss our day and laugh about perplexing cultural differences. There will definitely be no TV blaring, no fast food served, and no eating alone. What a peaceful change of pace is Urubamba living!

Article 2: A Typical Day

The rooster crows at 5:30am and suddenly a chorus of barnyard animals makes my little Japanese-brand alarm clock obsolete. I would like to sleep until at least seven, but the rooster continues to announce the sun every fifteen minutes, reminding me to wake up with more persistence than a snooze button. Within minutes, my host family is awake as well. Zoila, the cheerful single mother is yelling, “¡Apúrate, hijas!” beckoning her sleepy daughters to get ready for school. I am defeated. It’s time to rise and speak Spanish.

I exit my bedroom and head for the shower, remembering to flip the switch that brings electricity to the bathroom for hot water (hopefully). Homes in Urubamba only have running water during morning and evening hours of each day, so I have to time it right if I want to be clean. The family I live with bathes once a week on Sundays. It is truly a family affair.

On my way to eat breakfast in the family’s restaurant, which sits on the central plaza, I encounter a world that was already working long before the rooster called. Women in knee-length skirts with leg warmers, sandals made of old tires and characteristic Andean derby hats line the streets carrying bundles on their hunched backs. Dogs are hunting for discarded scraps of food, and children in uniforms are giggling on their way to school. The sky is cloudless, and the sun is already strong through the thin air at 9,000 feet.

The central market is opening, which means that all of the flies in Urubamba are finding the way to the raw meat. There is a man on the corner with a huge crowd around him. He has six jars, each containing a worm of a different size. He is selling small seeds, which he says will flush these worms out of the intestines. He claims that we all have them crawling around in our stomachs as he points to the parasite of “los borrachos” (of the drunks). A little way down the row, a woman is cutting the head off a chicken. A street mutt devours it as soon as it hits the ground.

I spend the morning working on my internship project. I am writing a grant proposal to a variety of major technology corporations in an attempt to acquire ten more computers for the Internet Academy – Computer Center of Urubamba, which is the only computer learning institution in this area. The Academy currently has seventeen computers and is serving nine different elementary and high schools with basic computer training. You will not find a PC in many of the homes of Urubamba.

The Academy is the only educational center of its kind, and yet it is unable to achieve self-sufficiency due to the high costs of Internet connection and operation. The geographical isolation of villages like Urubamba in the Sacred Valley of Peru makes it difficult to obtain affordable Internet service. However, we are confident that more computers would generate greater income for the Academy. The difficulty lies in demonstrating to others the urgency that we know to be true of the requested donation.

After a few hours of work, I stroll down to the restaurant again for lunch: a three course meal of soup, trout and tuna, a small and juicy cactus fruit typical to this region. After the meal, I am dismissed with the customary single kiss on the right cheek from my entire family, six in total. As I am sure is becoming evident, food is an important aspect of the Peruvian culture. Most of the day, the women in my host family are in the kitchen pealing, chopping, boiling, roasting and sautéing in preparation for the next meal.

After lunch I have a few hours to relax, so I meander back to my organization’s headquarters on “Peruvian time”, which means taking it slooooooow. Side note: Peruvians are never on time. Our concept of punctuality in the United States is not shared by this culture. An appointment signifies a moment in which you arrive at your designated meeting spot, but you are told to return later. The person with whom you have scheduled is not in. This is a cause of frustration for many of the volunteers working here. For me it is an excuse to walk around town, inventing creative new routes each time I am told to come back later.

At dinner, all of the volunteers eat together. Two are ill, three are vegetarians, one is allergic and the rest are famished. Our very able chef, Yoni, has her hands full. A little red wine with dinner never hurt anyone, so we toast with an emphatic “¡Salúd!” Our second three-course meal of the day leaves us feeling like the stuffed peppers that we have just finished consuming.

The nighttime after dinner is very quiet. Only dogs are left to roam the dim streets. There is no movie theater, no billiards hall, and no ice cream parlor to hang out in at the end of a workday. There are three bars in town, one of which caters flagrantly to the “gringos”, which means high prices and blaring Brittany Spear’s remixes. So we decide to rent a movie, which was clearly filmed by somebody with a home video camera inside the movie theater, most likely in Lima.

I rest my bilingual brain early. Before sliding into my bed, I check the sheets for scorpions, which have a reputation for residing under pillows. Now that I am used to the sounds, the smells and the surroundings, I sleep without interruption. My dreams gradually begin…in Spanish.

Article 3

I have assumed my position, and yet remain unassuming, as Project Coordinator for ProPeru Service Corps. A small but rapidly expanding Peace Corps alternative, ProPeru offers abroad experiences to grads and post-grads while tackling with commendable success that elusive aim to “make a difference”. ProPeru is a two-part operation; it is a business that fulfills the expectations of eager, young explorers who pay to participate in an adventure-packed volunteer program in the Sacred Valley of Peru, and it is a registered not-for-profit organization in search of funding to build Internet academies, provide medical attention, improve education and literacy levels, protect the environment and raise the overall standard of living for inhabitants of the region.

Our headquarters are located in Urubamba, the capital of the larger Urubamba province, which incorporates the glacial hats of 15,000-foot summits, a patchwork expanse of thick and ruddy soils, and the legendary discovery of Hiram Bingham, Machu Picchu. Our presence in town as tenants, restaurant patrons and souvenir purchasers alone invests approximately $50,000 annually into Urubamba. In an attempt to fulfill a promise to ourselves not to over-saturate the town with the “white amoeba effect” or, in other words, too many gringos, we are considering expansion to another deserving Peruvian village. In addition, ProBelize will graduate from diapers at the end of July with the completion of its first month-long volunteer program. Pro South Africa is also a twinkle gleaming ever-more-brightly in our director’s eye.

ProPeru’s executive padre is Richard Webb, a Peruvian-born Jersey boy, who decided after various years working with high school students on volunteer programs that he wanted to run something of his own. So he returned to his bean-shaped homeland, recognizing the insatiable demand for social and economic assistance. After some scouting and study, he chose the region surrounding Cusco, appropriately deemed by the Incas “the bellybutton of the world”. And here we are. It is a crispy Andean night, and there is Salsa music blaring its pendulum-hip rhythm on the street in front of me.

Today we inaugurated the Medical Outreach Campaign that I coordinated with the Ministry of Health and a pair of Spanish doctors, who are working in Urubamba for that same aim I spoke of earlier. We tested an entire middle school for vision impairment and other eye abnormalities. In a couple of weeks, we will take the worst cases to Cusco, where they will receive free glasses and/or operations, depending on the affliction. Tomorrow I will be accompanying a twelve-year-old girl, who lost an eye while playing with a grenade that she discovered in her daddy’s bedroom, to the Spaniards’ medical clinic for surgery. Donations withdrawn from each ProPeru volunteer’s program fee will pay for her operation.

My job is one of the most fulfilling and exasperating on Earth. It is to dig and dig in search of a source that will quench the need that is all around, but never find that munificent spring that we are excavating for. So, instead, we must channel and reroute and spread the resources we have got. This we accomplish with our projects and our enduring support for the community. But no matter how many schools we build or how many ditches we dig, poverty is systematic and it persists. Children sit on the cement floor of their classroom because there are no funds to buy desks. A mother squats and gives birth into her own hands because the trip to the nearest medical facility is too long, and she has no bus money. The water runs dry for five hours at midday because there is not enough to go around. When it flows, it isn’t drinkable anyway.

Development work is to realize all of these things will persist long after you and your organization are gone. People will go right on surviving without water or medical care or education until that hidden source, the intricate solution, is found that miraculously produces and indiscriminately provides. Development work is simply to do the best you can now to supply a slow but steady trickle of what you pray in the future will geyser for all.