Manka'uma

Living at Azul Wasi has become more of a camping feat, not dissimilar to my experiences on D of E except that this is a 24/7 lifestyle and the rain gets in our room (walls, windows and roof!) whereas the tents were always more waterproof. Due to a lack of gas for the little stove we normally use in the kitchen, today lunch was cooked outside using a contraption made from 2 breeze blocks, some stabilizing rocks, and everyone had to hunt for the wood to stoke it. It felt rustic not only because of the huge black stain added to the mud brick wall behind but that when it rained everything stopped. I am starting to pick up the cooking here now and learnt the names to some of the dishes and soups we eat, a fair share of them are in Quechua. Meat is lacking in the menu again but there is always plenty of everything else. The Quechua is coming along too: we can talk and order (basically) in the shops and have a fairly big range of vocab from insults, colours, numbers etc, but the grammar is coming soooo frustratingly slowly, mainly because no one understand it themselves. Bautista seems the best at tuition so far so I help him with his chores just to pester him.

Me, Maritza and Tanya scrubbed up on New Years.

Since Christmas we have been catching up on some strange chores around the home, such as bathing the cows with our only soap, returfing the main yard bit from turf just lifted from the next doors unused fields (very possibly without permission), picking the millions of radishes, getting the cows out of the ditches as they regularly fall in, herding ducks, de-algaefying the well and all sorts more. Tanya and I have had to up the level of authority following the Profe's leaving AW for 3 months (yeahhh). We are pretty concerned in anticiption for Anastasia's holiday at the end of the month, where it will just be me, Tanya and the boys unless Alcides has a trump card ready... I have definitely begun to feel like a Mum around here: cooking, sewing up their trousers and shirt holes, the presents at Christmas, enforcing chores and rules, breaking into Ivan's locker when he locked his key inside (he didn't tell anyone, but Tanya and I noticed he had worn the same clothes for a long time and put two and two together), making plant pots and flowers from plastic bottles, breaking up fights and monopoly over-competitiveness, wiping tears or mud, finally getting to teach English, playing imaginary games, getting the boys to write their Christmas thank you letters, paper aeroplane competitions, running to Oropesa with them for the evening's bread and getting completely caught in the rain and soaked on the way back. Just tonight I had to break one of the dorm doors in because 2 of the boys were being bullies and locked Oscar out and went to sleep while he played Uno on his own in the biblioteca for half an hour more.

New Years was awesome. We started off with Aji de Gallina at the Garcia Ojeda household, our pretty much only friends in Oropesa due to the remoteness of Azul Wasi. Maritza Garcia Ojeda is the youngest of 8 sisters and we know her from the cake shop in Oropesa. Most of her older sisters still live in the huge family house which is split into quarters, and they all take turns looking after their various neices and daughters. I particularly like 2 year old Mikaela. There is a distinct lack of men in the house; the older sisters of Maritza are all deep down lovely and very trustworthy, but actually day to day Tanya and I find them totally terrifying... Claudia and Josefina are the only ones we really know and force us to play piano, speak Quechua and firm-hand-shake competitions.  Next we caught the bus into Cusco and got the traditional lucky yellow underwear at Wanchaq market before making our way to our hostel on Calle Meloq. We ended up at midnight, with another friend called Sarah from Wyoming who has visited AW a few times, on the main plaza which was packed and full of dancing people in coats and scarves, so Tanya felt a little out of place in our dresses... Children we going round selling hand-held fireworks which could most possibly be the most dangerous thing ever invented in the world. They are a huge cone you hold as high as you can in the air, from which not-so-small fireworks and flying flames shoot into the night sky and then sometimes back down into the crowd. Each one cost S/3.50, so less than a pound! The clubs were charging a bomb to get into so Tanya and I settled for the traditional run round the plaza at midnight, which was good for the cold but was 'con despacio' due to the altitude, crowds and intoxification.

Next day, Maritza left the hostel early so Tanya and I decided to be cultural and finally visited the Qoricancha/Santo Domingo church on the Av. Sol which was pretty cool, and our first run-in with some real Inka walls and their civilisation's outstanding masonry. They are  literally huge and seamless! Very impressive, even to 18 year old girls (see pictures above). There were tonnes of tourists, strange considering this is the low-time season to come. We can already tell Cusco in the summer will be heaving...

That's all this week, this blog has no plan really, just as and when I fancy describing stuff and have access to the internet it will appear.

Not really missing England, life is cool in a primitive and subsistence kinda way!

- Rach xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx