I sat with perfectly erect posture at the old wooden supper
table. There were two sliced palta
and a bag of white bread in the center—the real food was one the way. I waited
alone at that table until it came, and it was potatoes. Some other edibles were
present as well—a fried egg, some white rice—but mostly just potatoes. It turns
out Peru had about 5000 different types of potatoes to offer me. I would
probably eat about 20 of them over the next three months, and I liked some of
them. The yuca potato, for instance, is a slightly sweeter and softer form of
the potato that also happens to be filled with cyanide. They’re really good
once you cook out the toxins.
Sadly, we
weren’t having yuca that night. We had yellow potatoes that we peeled with our
fingernails (eating the skin is bad for the stomach). As a side, my host dad gave
me my choice of about 10 different types of corn he’d harvested just last week
from his chakra across the field. I decided
to pass up the exotic purple one for some regular choclo—a starchy (yes, like potatoes) white corn. We ate in silence
that first night, except to offer me seconds, and thirds, and then dessert. I
found that dessert means hot tea in Peru, and oddly enough was served to me in
a massive white-plastic thermos. “Oddly” because it was placed within a house
with bare cement walls above the first floor, on a table of hand-carved wood,
next to eggs collected that morning, and between a family that’s main income
came from Celestino’s 12-hour days in the chakra
and Sundays leading the small church service. And then there was the
American plastic thermos. When we didn’t have any tea bags left, we just mixed
cane sugar and the hot water together for flavor. It was still called dessert.
The flood
thing was actually a crazy story. In 2010, a torrential amount of rainfall hit
southern Peru, about 67% more than normal—and it didn’t stop for weeks.
Eventually all the nearby rivers started overflowing, which wouldn’t be too big
of a problem, except that the majority of homes in rural Peru are made of adobe, a tough mixture of clay, mud,
animal poop, and straw. So when the water level rose around the houses to about
the first floor, they simply melted and fell apart. Over 28,000 people lost
their homes during that storm. The famous Machu Picchu attraction was shut down
and the government used helicopters to rescue stranded tourists. Luckily, my
host family had just finished building one of the first cement houses in the
town. But water levels were rising, and they had nowhere to go when the flooded
river’s new course led straight into and around their house.
They were
on the roof, praying to God for help, when the members of the village church
appeared on the high ground. They made a human chain leading into the raging
brown river around the house. One by one, the members of my host family had jumped
to join the human chain and were pulled back to the high ground. 20 people died
in that flood, but the Cutipa family survived because of the people who loved
them.
People in
Huacarpay and nearby Lucre lived in donated tents for months before the
government built every family a one-room cement house on the other side of the
river. People migrated to the new town, rebuilt adobe houses, and tried to
salvage possessions, and then I showed up and ate potatoes and choclo. They’d housed Sammy Rosario for
SST before me, and they’d welcome dozens more students into their home after me.
I started talking, started slouching, and had my first drink of alcohol with a
family I’d come to love, but I knew I was just one potato of 5000.
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