By Lola Sanchez-Carrion
...................................................................................
From an airplane, the Peruvian Andes look like fists. Its peaks are knuckles, with permanent grooves and bends etched in brown rock. A few hundred years ago, one of the fists decided to loosen its grip. When it did, a knuckle flattened. At this breach between peaks is Ayaviri, a town born in a sea of fists. A town known for nothing but its cancacho, roasted lamb cooked in a wood-fired oven and served with potatoes and chili. Even this, it is barely known for. I haven’t heard of it until I get off the bus and smell the burnt meat being pressed upon me. Cancacho? A vendor holds a Styrofoam plate to my face. A welcome offering. I smell the burnt, fatty meat. Not today.
If you climb the peak at Ayaviri’s edge, you will see hundreds of tin rooves sitting loosely on slanted clay homes. I tell myself this town was built in the aftermath of a tsunami. Wave comes in and destroys everything. Wave leaves only bits of clay and metal sheets. Boom. Ayaviri is an iron skeleton built from the bones a tsunami left behind. It’s a victory story in my mind. But there was no tsunami. I wish a wave could make the broken nature of this place easier to explain. But there was no wave. Ayaviri is a town left in pieces before it was even hit.
This is my second time in Ayaviri and I still find the weather unbearable. Every morning I am here, I wake up with a chill that starts in my spine and ends in my fingers, numbing them. The food is routine. Every meal starts with a soup, and every soup has mystery meat in it. You don’t ask what the meat is. You just eat it. I lift the spoon to my mouth and smell the heavy broth. The identity behind the mystery meat reveals itself at the table next to me. It’s alpaca.
Ayaviri is the kind of place people visit to donate the bikes and sweaters that sit in the back of their closets, forgotten. Whatever your savior complex, Ayaviri feels like the place to fill it. The biggest saviors in this town are the Sodalits, a group of consecrated men belonging to the Sodalitium of Christian Life. Think of them as male nuns, called by God to serve Ayaviri and the surrounding villages. They pack up their pick-up trucks with donations and plunge through the valley, stopping in Pucara, Orurillo, Asillo, using only the landscape for reference. The bend of a mountain seems to say turn left. The crack in the road ahead, go straight. The snow-covered peak, make a sharp right. I sit in the back as the car twists and turns and see only a continuous reel of mountains. There is a lot that they see that I don’t.
The missionaries’ devotion is unwavering. I see it in hands marked with callouses from hauling bags of clothes on and off the back of trucks, in cheeks and noses permanently reddened from too much time in the cold. I see it in the mountain dust that covers their ears, their clothes, their hair. There is a beauty to their weathered ways. But there seems to be a limit to the beauty I see because I’m not called to serve like they are. I’m not as religious.
Growing up, Catholicism was not a calling. It was never something I chose to be a part of. Yet there I was, being molded and shaped by ceremonies that all seemed to start with the letter “C”: Communion. Confession. Confirmation. Check. Check. Check. The promise seemed to be that if I let myself be assembled, I’d feel whole. Holy, even. But I didn’t. I had all the “C’s” under my belt and felt faithless. I was told I would have a newfound appreciation for Sunday masses after my confirmation. The appreciation came when I realized the sermon was just enough time to recite pieces of my Biology textbook in my mind. I tested myself on glycolysis, tracking the breakdown of glucose while everyone else tracked the priest’s words. By the time he stopped speaking and we all rose for the Our Father, glucose had been rearranged and split into a three- carbon sugar.
It was curiosity that sent me to Ayaviri, not religion. I was aware that after ten years living in Peru, my time in the country had been warped by privilege: An English education at the American School of Lima, summers at private beach condos, houses in San Isidro with carefully kept lawns and ten-foot walls, making it easier to turn away from the country’s inequality. But it wasn’t until Duke, where I was fed lofty words like Decolonization Theory and Geographical Determinism and the White Savior Complex, that I was able to articulate all that I didn’t know. Or, perhaps more importantly, why there was so much I didn’t know. A fellowship from Duke in the summer of 2017 was my chance to ground those lofty words in something real. I was ready to see the Peru that sat, waiting, beyond my ten-foot walls.
Curiosity sends me to the jungle first. In the north of the Peruvian Amazon, a boundless green forest cracks open, making room for Iquitos, a port city of open-air markets and stilt homes. No roads lead to Iquitos - you can only get there by plane or boat –yet it is a city that is always in transit. The only mode of transport in town is the rickshaw, their engines coughing like they have food stuck in their pipes. They form lanes of five in roads fit for three. Fume exhaust lingers in the air. I take a two-hour bus to Nauta, another port city. I arrive and am met with a quieter version of Iquitos, but my stay here is short. I’m taken quickly taken to the edge of the river, where I’m instructed to get on the wooden speed boat in the water. This will take me to Puerto Prado, my final stop. I ride with Teresita, a woman from the indigenous village I am visiting. She has been sent to come get me. The motor starts and the boat moves and we are soon surrounded by nothing by green silence. I turn around and Nauta is out of sight, hidden behind a curtain of thick trees. The only sound is the boat’s motor, pushing us into the jungle.
During my time in Puerto Prado, I stay with Ema, the village leader. From outside, her home is similar to the other sixteen in the village. Wooden panels for walls. A roof built of dried palm trees. The house sits a few feet above the ground, suspended by stilts. But inside, a jaguar is painted across the living room wall and a red hammock hangs by the door and hot water and tea sit, waiting, on the dining room table. Pictures of previous visitors are tacked to the wall of the room I sleep in. My bed is dressed in a mosquito net and light blue sheets. The town is silent by seven and Ema and I eat our plantains and rice in the dark – there is no electricity. Her voice fills the room.
“This is one of the only Cocama communities left in Peru,” she tells me.
Every time she speaks of the village, she refers to it as a community. La comunidad. I love this. For a week, I attempt to weave myself into the comunidad and am, at first, met with friction. When I walk with five kids from Puerto Prado to the school in the neighboring village, no one talks to me. The only sounds are those of the forest. Leaves break under our feet. A fruit falls. Wind hisses between trees.
At the school, Agriculture is the first class of the day. I am told to grab a pickaxe and cut through the grass in the school yard. We are digging through the Earth to plant yucca. I hold the handle in my hands and swing the metal head into the soil, my back burning against the sun. After a few minutes, my hole is the size of a Frisbee. I am proud. Then I look to my left and see that Cristian, one of the boys from Puerto Prado, has dug a hole big enough to fit a coffin in. Blisters fill the spaces between my fingers. I’m sweating. The kids laugh. They walk over and adjust my grip on the wooden handle, creating more space between my hands.
“Like this,” one says, grabbing his pickaxe to provide a demo. He pulls out a whole piece of the Earth in one swing.
On the walk back, I break the silence with music. Despacito plays from my phone and the two girls walking ahead of me start to sing. When they look back at me, I’m singing too. By the time we reach Puerto Prado, we are all in full swing, hips thrusting, arms swaying, stomping across the forest floor.
From Ema, I learn to stay away from the rainforest at night. If you wander too far, she says, the gnome that lives among the trees will snatch you. Kill you, even. I learn to be careful with the river, too. There are evil spirits that pull you by the ankle if you swim alone. I learn how to kill a mosquito on my leg before it bites me. I learn that trees and rivers are sacred.
When my week in Puerto Prado is over, Ema insists on taking the journey back to Iquitos with me. We take the boat, then the bus. Her wrinkled hand rests on mine when we ride the rickshaw from the bus stop to the airport, our bodies sliding left and right as the cart weaves through traffic.
“You come back, okay?” she said, still holding my hand as I step off the rickshaw, the airport waiting behind me. I can feel the rough lines in her palms. She lets go of my hand. We hug.
A few weeks later, I get on another flight, this time to the mountains of Ayaviri, but my stay there is brief. I stop there for only two hours before heading to Orurillo, a town thirty minutes north. I arrive, anticipating an experience that will mirror the one in the jungle. Live among a traditionally indigenous community. Observe and learn. I find myself, instead, in a guest house with seventeen American missionaries who are there on a three-week pilgrimage. I spend the week as an honorary member of the group, translating prayers and going to mass and playing with children. It’s a trip of juggling many unexpected hats, but that story is for another time. What matters, for the sake of this one, is that on this trip I meet Elkin, a forty-year-old missionary from Colombia. He asks me what I’m doing in Orurillo and I make it clear that I’m not there on a spiritual journey. I’m here to understand the world beyond my ten-foot-walls, I say. He nods, commends me. He tells me he lives in Ayaviri.
“If you ever want to come to do a project or something, give me a call.”
The following summer, I do. I offer to document the service projects him and the other missionaries lead in the valley. I say I will take photos, write a few articles. He agrees. And so I dive, head first, into the fists, this time for slightly longer.
There are tricks to everything in the guest house I am placed in. Kick the door hard after twisting the lock. Use a match to light the stove. Bring enough underwear; the washing machines don’t work. There are six other volunteers in the house – all are ex-alums from Via Caritas, an all-girl Catholic school in Lima. They are here for four days. The response I get when I say I’m there for eight – eyebrows lifting to form half-moons, mouths dropping slightly - seems to suggest that eight is too much. This place is too cold and too sad and too rough to spend more than four days. I say “eight” again proudly and feel like my longer stay grants me a toughness that these girls don’t have. A layer of thicker skin. I liked being thought of as this kind of person. But it took two days to realize my skin was much thinner than I thought. After two days, you feel the mountain’s fists being pressed upon you, nudging you to leave. I think of the missionaries, like Elkin, who seem oblivious to the strength in these fists. I tell myself the mountains must be nicer to them because they seem to see something beyond the peaks. That something makes this roughness bearable.
I did not bring bikes or used clothes to Ayaviri. I was not there to save. I brought a camera. A pen. A notebook. I was there to take pictures and write. Elkin was my gateway to revisit this part of Peru, and the work I would produce for him was, in a sense, a gateway of its own. The world beyond these mountains would soon see the work of these missionaries and bear witness to their calling.
Elkin wears the same clothes everyday: the quarter-zip, the fleece vest, waterproof cargo pants with zippers around the knees, rugged hiking boots. My clothes seem to scream that I am a glorified guest: the quarter-zip I stole from my dad’s closet, Doc Marten lace-ups that leave my ankles with blisters, the beanie with my high school mascot on the bend above the forehead. Go condors. Despite a body unfit for this weather, and a soul unfit to be carrying out work in God’s
name, I become Elkin’s mini-disciple. For a week, he picks me up from the guest house, his red face smiling from his dusty truck, and takes me around the city, dropping me off where he thinks I’ll find good stories. I go to a local center for the disabled, where I paint walls and play with children and speak to a blind man who lost his sight working in a mine, the mercury exposure destroying both eyes. I go to an old warehouse to sort donated sweaters and vests and t-shirts into piles by size, then pack them into sacks. Twice, I see my high school uniform in the mountains of clothing, the familiar red letters spelling “Roosevelt” across the front of the sweater.
The sacks of clothing go to Usicayos, a town four hours away, and we go with them, straight through the mountains, the pickup truck bouncing on the poorly paved road. From the car, the grooves in these mountains become clear. They start at the peak and trickle down to the base, bending and twisting like veins. I open the window and trace my hands over the mountain’s lines. Wind gusts through the open glass, leaving my hair in knots. We stop for a photo at a peak covered in snow (this is my first time seeing snow in Peru). Elkin takes one of me doing a handstand. Back in the car, I see a river breaking two mountains apart, curving through them like a snake. I imagine how we, in the truck, must look from above: a silver speck swimming through the sea of fists.
When we reach Usicayos, an army of kids runs to the car. They look into the car window, hands cupped to their eyes like binoculars, and are surprised to find the girl in the high school beanie. The condor plastered to the top of her head. From inside the car, the girl feels, for a second, like she’s in a fishbowl. The feeling ends when the girl realizes why they are staring at her. They want her to get out of the car and help unwrap the rope holding the sacks of clothing to the truck. The girl gets over herself and this fishbowl feeling. This isn’t about her.
By the time I step out of the car to help with the ropes, the kids have made an assembly line from the trunk of the car to the courtyard behind the church. Elkin joins at the back of the line and I follow his lead, squeezing somewhere in the middle, where my weak arms go undetected. Sacks move from the truck to Elkin to one kid after another, to me, until they land in the courtyard. The younger ones need more hands to help keep the heavy sacks suspended. The older ones grab them with one hand – effortless, like they’re filled with feathers.
That night, I sleep on the floor of the guest house in the courtyard and wake up to church songs that blast from a boombox downstairs. It’s four am. In the kitchen, two kids sit by the window, shaping dough into small disks. The rest stand over the stove, tossing the disks into oil. Mouths move to pop renditions of religious songs I recognize, songs I heard on Sunday masses growing up, songs I sang in a voice that hid behind my mother’s, who was always off pitch but ringing with faith. My sister and I would tug her arm like it was a volume dial, hoping it would turn her down a notch. She always kept on singing.
Usicayos is not our final destination. It is a village I am told we can only reach by foot. This is where we’ll be leaving the donations. I promised the kids I’d get up early to help cook the snacks for the trip. Oil sizzles as each disk of dough is dropped in the pan. I have no idea what these fried things are but a boy hands me one wrapped in a paper towel and it tastes like a donut. I burn my tongue and ask for two more. We reload the car with half of the donations – the rest will stay in Usicayos – and drive to the bottom of this mystery mountain.
At the foot, we are handed llilclas, handwoven shoulder cloths used by Andean woman to carry their babies on their backs. We’re going to be using them to carry the clothes up. Elkin looks at me, then at the pile of donations in the back of the car. Then back at me. He hands me a light bundle, no more than ten pounds. I am, at first, offended, then relieved, when I tie the bundle to my back and look up at the mountain. It’s intimidatingly steep and there’s no paved path. The kids from Usicayos lead the way, running up the mountain, their lungs used to the thin air. The dust in their tracks seems to make fun of me and my heavy breathing, but I keep up. I stay close enough that by the time I reach the top, I’m covered in their dust. It takes two hours.
On this side of the mountain, we reach a village of families that barely speak Spanish. They speak Quechua. With Allillanchu kaskani being the only Quechua I am taught, I throw it around to everyone I meet. How are you? How are you? How are you? I am a broken record of words that make no sense to me when they come out of my mouth, but the words are met with welcoming eyes. Allillanchu, they say back. We rip open the sacks of donations and place the clothing in piles by size. Twenty villagers flock to us. With each item of clothing I hand out, there is a look I am given, a look half-filled with confusion – what is this blonde girl doing here? – and the other half gratitude.
When everyone’s hands are full, Elkin calls me over to where he is sitting with an indigenous woman from the village. She holds a vest for her son, a sweater for herself. She offers me a bag of potatoes as a sign of thank you and I cry. I cry for this place I never would have known existed, had Elkin not brought me here. I cry because the kids of Usicayos will see only a sliver of the world I get to see, yet they spend their day running up mountains to mystery villages, handing out clothes they themselves need. Maybe their sliver of the world is enough. Maybe my own is not. I cry so that I don’t forget. The dust, the vastness, the weight of the llicla on my back, the potatoes in my hand. I turn to Elkin with eyes that thank him for bringing me here. He nods, acknowledges my gratitude, but his eyes thank me too, for being here, for bearing witness, for carrying my own weight, plus ten pounds more.
When I leave Ayaviri, I promise Elkin and everyone there that I am going to write about them. That was, after all, why I went to Ayaviri in the first place. But I don’t. I don’t know how to do them justice. The second I sit down to write about them, I make myself busy. At home, I do not carry donations on my back, but the weight of Ayaviri and Usicayos and the town in the mountains - whose name I have forgotten – do not disappear. I feel this weight when I sit at my desk and attempt to write but find myself, instead, perusing through books and calling my friends and scrolling through photos. When I’m away at school, my mom uses my room as her office. She works better at my desk, she says. I think of this as I sink in my chair and feel myself slowly decaying. She calls me “the storyteller,” claims I’m the writer of the family. But what kind of writer am I if, when given the task of writing, I can’t get the words out? Maybe it would be easier if I just stood at the top of a mountain and screamed to the world. This is what I saw. This is why I cried. But who would listen to the girl who can’t even remember the village’s name? I look for a mountain to stand on, scream from, but I can’t find one. There are no mountains in Lima so I sit at my desk – at sea level – where I try to yell but the words don’t come out.
On my second day back in Lima, I get food poisoning. I refuse to think it was something I ate in Ayaviri. The thought of the food there making me sick ruins the memory I hold of the mountains and the people in them. It wasn’t Ayaviri, I tell my parents. It was the pesto I ate with Tato, my grandpa, at the Italian restaurant near my house.
When I tell friends about my trip to Ayaviri, I speak of the immensity I felt when climbing up that mountain. I speak of the struggle in the hike, the thinness in the air. I show them a photo I took of the view from the mountain’s peak. I zoom in as much as I can, pressing my fingers against the screen until I can make out the shape of the car at the bottom of the mountain, where we started the climb. That’s how far we walked, I say. I find myself reducing the account to an adventure tale. A four a.m. wakeup. A trek up a mountain in the middle of nowhere. The kind of thing Lola would do. I show them the photo of me with the llicla on. We laugh at the thought of me carrying the colorful cloth on my back. I want them to bear witness to the power in this village whose name I can’t remember, in the woman with the sack of potatoes, in the Allillanchus we all exchanged. I want them to understand the places in Peru where the mountain’s fist flattens, to feel the warmth that can come from what seems, from above, like a cold, sad, rough place. But I don’t mention the tears. I don’t mention the way Elkin and I thanked each other with our eyes. I don’t mention the little girl who grabbed my phone from my lap during mass that evening to take a photo of herself.
“Para que no te olvides de mi!” So that you don’t forget me, she said, before placing the phone on my lap again.
On my trip to Orurillo two summers ago, I was sitting at the table with the American missionaries, when one of them asked me what my relic was.
“My what?”
He explains that a relic is a piece of a dead saint’s body. I cringe at the thought of a finger rotting in a box in the back of a church somewhere. It doesn’t need to be a body part, he clarifies. It can be a necklace, a cross, something that sums up who you were during your time on Earth. You decide, after much thought, that you relic would be an ampersand because it represents the word “and”, and the word “and” is always in between things. Like you. Between Peru and the U.S., between Spanish and English. “And” is a word between words and you are a girl between worlds. But “and” is also essential to bringing ideas together. You like to think of yourself as this person. Someone that uses words to build bridges. So you get the ampersand tattooed to your ankle at a hostel in Belize. The kind of thing Lola would do. But even with the ampersand fixed in your skin, those bridges don’t get any easier to build. The words will always be hard to write.
Critique
Thank you so much for submitting this! This is the longest piece I've read so far in editing for the Writer's Collective, but I can honestly say it's also my favorite. You have such a way with words. I was so pulled into these stories, to these unique and beautiful places, to the people you met and characterized so well. You carry through the piece that it's difficult to put your experiences into words, but I think you did a wonderful job.
Because this is such a long piece, I noted suggestions and comments as I read. Some are more general, while others are nitpick-y. I'm going to list them all out below and you can take what you want from it. It's your story, and any changes you make are your choice.
1). The first thing I noted was just a point of confusion for me. You talk about the Sodalits in Ayaviri and their pick-up trucks, but then you say you sit in the backend watch the landscape go by. Were you in the truck with the Solidats? If not, I think this could be clarified.
2). Your continuing metaphor of the mountains as fists and knuckles is so unique and really ties the individual stories together. I loved it!
3). Note on the passive voice: when you discuss Catholicism (by the way, I love the idea of all the C's), you say "Yet there I was, being molded and shaped by ceremonies..." I think there's a way to rephrase this so it's not in the passive voice. Maybe the ceremonies take hold and attempt to contort you. Perhaps you can use this as an opportunity to personify them.
4). I know you mention you took this journey as part of a Duke fellowship, but I found myself wanting a little more context. Why were you hopping from city to city? If it was to explore Peru as a whole, could you state this in the paragraph about Duke? I was expecting you to stay/live in one city, and then when you started traveling it threw me a little.
5). I love the entire scene about the Agriculture class with the kids from Puerto Prado. "He pulls out a whole piece of the Earth in one swing" is such a great sentence.
6). I also love how true you are to each town's culture. The lessons you learned from Ema about the gnome in the rainforest and the evil spirits in the river were fantastic.
7). Nitpick on grammar: "I offer to document the service projects him and the other missionaries lead in the valley" should be "he and the other missionaries".
8). The whole extended story about Elkin: does this take place the same summer as the rest of the story, or when you come back the next summer to document the service projects? I would have liked some clarification.
9). "With Allillanchu kaskani being the only Quechua I am taught, I throw it around to everyone I meet." Another opportunity for you to twist around the passive voice. I think this can be rephrased to make it a little less clunky.
10). One more tiny typo!: "You decide, after much thought, that you relic would be an ampersand..." should be "your relic." (By the way, I love this choice of a tattoo and the meaning behind it!)
11). I'm grappling with your on-and-off use of the second person, both when you're in the "fishbowl" on the mountain and when you're discussing the ampersand. I can't decide if it works for me or not. It's unique, and it offers an out-of-body interpretation of the experience, but I don't know if it jolts me too far out your mind or not. I just wanted to point out that I'm teetering there, and you can do with that what you will.
There's no doubt that this story is fantastic. I can't emphasize enough how much I loved it and appreciate the unique insight you gave me—and any other readers—into this experience. As I mentioned before, these suggestions are just that—suggestions—and I believe can only help an already amazing piece get even better. Thank you again for your submission!