Fernando took me on a little tour of the Wednesday market: Wal-Mart, Urubamba style.  It was chaotic in a beautiful way.

Afterwards, we went to go pick up some wood and when we were carrying it back, we took a rest at a chicheria and he bought me my first Chicha (Peruvian corn beer).  The Chircherias and just houses with poles sticking out the door with a red flag in the shape of a flower on the end.  There are probably 200 of them in Urubamba. 

For my mom's birthday, we had pizza and wine and sang happy birthday (in English… it's a universal song).  I introduced my American family's tradition of asking cheesy questions to the birthday person.  I asked what year she would relive if she had the chance and she said she would go back to the year when she danced and drank.  Pablo asked her who she would marry if she was 25 and everyone laughed (kids say the darndest things).  

Mercedes (the ProPeru coordinator) took me on a tour of Chichubamba where I will be doing my work with Agrotourism.   After wandering down dirt roads lined with dilapidated little house/shelters and garden plots we found our way through a short little Peruvian door (the average height here is like 5'2"), down a winding mud path and into a small clearing in the trees where a small group of oregano farmers had gathered for a meeting (yes, oregano as in Italian pizza).  The president was explaining the techniques for cultivating and transplanting the little sprouts and the women in their skirts and top hat and the men in their dress pants and long sleeves listened attentively and asked questions.   I was presented as the twice-weekly volunteer and they all proceeded to bid on which days each of them would have me as a helper.  In my white t-shirt and blue jeans standing about a half-foot taller than all of them, I felt like some kind of alien good-luck fairy that they would pass around amongst themselves to bring prosperity.  

The first one to claim me was dona Jeronima.  When she saw me walking towards her chacra she shouted something in quechua and then threw her head back and laughed.  She retrieved some plumbs she had stashed in her top hat and offered them to me--which I accepted hesitantly, hearing echoes of the warnings from everyone to not eat any produce without removing the skin and boiling it.  Oh well... The little Spanish that she spoke was so meshed with quechua that I couldn't understand her very well.  She handed me a crude plow-like tool and gave me some charade instructions which I interpreted to be: plow a straight line in the plot.  She left to go find another tool, and I went along clearing a little row.  When she came back, she had two little mini-machetes and she showed me how to use them to de-weed (it was then that I realized that I had been plowing the flower she was cultivating, but she didn’t say anything).  It was amazing how she squated down in her layered skirts and hacked away at the overgrown plants.  The evolutionary logic of short peruvians became very clear to me as I tried to assume the same hunkered-down position from 5 feet 7 inches above the ground--not very easy.  But there we were, the gringa and the andina, up in a cloud forest attacking the ground with machetes.   Every once in a while she would look up at me and cackle with her nearly toothless smile, but I could tell she was trying to encourage me with the quechua babble I couldn't translate.  I almost lost track of time, just sitting there meticulously uprooting the weeds from the bulb and then smashing the bulbs against a small rock with the knife.  The work seemed so slow and the size of the task so large (even though the plot was no bigger than a large kitchen), that you couldn't help but just be in the present moment.