Monday I went to Huilloc to do a formal door-to-door community needs assessment. Unfortunately I had decided not to bring my camera, which is a shame because there were so many surreal and beautiful moments as I wandered through this rural community.
Amy, a Sacred Valley Health volunteer, and I were tasked by Leticia, the SVH nurse, to climb up the hill (mountain rather) that this community sits on to find the promotora named Teresa to help us do the questionaire and serve as our Quechua interpreter. As we started our journey up the steep hilside, we asked whoever we could find where Teresa Echami lived. They would just chuckle a little at the out of breath Gringas and point up the mountain and say "Arrrrrriba arriba" - waaaaay up there. So we kept on trucking. We would be stopped occassionally by the few other people traveling along the foot path who wanted to figure out what we were doing up in the mountains. One man was clearly drunk or high on cocoa leaves and was making no sense at all. Amy and I chuckled to ourselves as we tried to make sense of his incomplete Spanish/Quechua questions.
We got to the top of one hill to discover a makeshift soccerfield in the middle of the mountain, set just in front of another dauntly steep slope with even more houses nestled on top. Asking again, people pointed to a house at the top of this peak to indicate where we should go. So we trecked on. Finally, huffing and puffing, we made it to the top. As we paused to catch our breath, we turned around and were in awe at the way Huilloc layed out below us. Our magical and literally breathtakingly difficult 1.5 hour climb allowed us an incredible view of the slowly climbing valley and distant glaciers. If only I had remembered my camera....
We turned around to find two darling little girls gawking at us. We asked if they knew where Teresa lived, and the just looked at us saying the two Quechua works I know "ari" - yes, and "mana" - no. We wandered a little further only to stumble upon a group of women sitting amidst piles of "Paja" - hay, and "papas" - potatoes - layed out on blankets. A beautiful image of how these women spend their days. They confirmed that the two little girls belonged to Teresa, but that she was infact off with her "burro" - donkey - for the day.
So we tried to take advantage of what time we had left to talk to these people so high up in the Huilloc community. We interviewed some of these women in broken Spanish on both ends. Then continued around the slope to find a few more hidden houses. We walked up to each yelling "Compañera?" until someone would emerge to talk to us. A cute 17 year old girl helped us ask her mom questions, then accompanied us to two of her neighbor's houses to interpret for us. At one house, we were invited into the field outside their house. The woman of the house layed down a blanket for us to sit on while we chatted, which I was grateful for since the "yard" was essentially a field filled with pellets of goat poop. Her husband was clearly drunk (confirmed by his wife), and was super funny and very adamantly told us that he was very healthy and has no health problems when we asked about what health concerns affect men in the community.
We bid our young friend/interpreter goodbye and started down the mountain taking in the sites and pickin up an interview or two on the way. As we went down, it realized how incredibly high we were. When we headed the slope below the soccer field, we had to stop for a pack of llamas and alpacas heading up the hill at us. Gorgeous. We made it down and met up with leticia and headed back to town, to compile the data we collected, but the incredible day and intimate look into the lives of the people in Huilloc stuck with me.
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