Oxapampa and Pozuzo

It's a liiiitle late for this blog since I took this trip over a month ago. I actually was talking to Mervi (my travel buddy for this trip) while we were in Oxapampa about how ridiculously busy we would be immediately after getting back from this trip. Aaand we were right.

We opened our kids' center in the first week of July, and as with any new project we've been occupied with working out the kinks, and then being a little short of volunteers in August didn't help much either.

But now things are settling down and here's the blog post!

Wooden church in the Oxapampa main square (plaza de armas)

Inside the wooden church

The municipality building looking kinda like a Southern mansion

Pala Qu'ala

I'm on the theme of Lima day trips to the Andes lately.

Probably because the Andes are so pretty! And surprisingly close to Lima are beautiful, lesser known, verdant areas full of farmland and waterfalls. I love the fact that I live on the East side of Lima so close to the pretty part of the Limeñan Andes. 

This past weekend we went with a group of volunteers to San Jerónimo de Surco - also just called Surco - in the Huarochirí province to hike to the waterfall Pala Qu'ala (also spelled Palakala). The trip was pretty painless - go to Chosica (I describe the process of how to arrive there in my Markahuasi blog here) to Parque Echenique. At the Parque, you get off and immediately take a right on the road behind the plaza, which is where the buses going to Surco are located. These buses have a final destination at Matucana (also a pretty hiking spot), so they will have Matucana written on the side. It's S/3.50 one way to get to Surco.

When you get off at Surco, it's pretty apparent how to find the trail to Palakala. You walk straight down the road from where the bus drops you, and there should be a hut with tourist information where you pay an entrance fee next to the Municipalidad building. No one was manning the hut, so we went without paying the fee :/ but I believe it's super minimal, maybe S/2. The trail was easy to find, you just walk to the end of the road where the bus drops you off, hang a right, and keep walking till you see the sign pointing you to Palakala. From there, just follow the red arrows, they're pretty clear. 

Follow me!

Marcahuasi

Several weeks back we went on a little two day trip to Marcahuasi....

Little Peru trips (Ayacucho)

Since I last wrote in February, I've mostly been working and hanging out in Lima, exploring various nooks & crannies of the city. But I've taken a few smaller trips to other parts of Peru too. 

The rest of February was mostly working and hanging out with Peruvian friends & volunteers, seeing parts of Lima like Huaca Pucllana (some pretty ruins in Miraflores) and going to a friend's birthday party.

Posing outside Erico's (which we lovingly call Carmen's for the woman who always takes our order) in Chaclacayo 

 Outside Huaca Pucllana in Miraflores

Nearly 4 months in

Hello everyone :)

My lovely friend Thomas just reminded me that I have not blogged in a while, so let me give you a quick update on life here in Huaycán....

Pachamanca at Adely's (+ recipe for Siete Semillas)

In early December I got the amazing opportunity to attend a Pachamanca at the house of one of the participants in a program I work for. Pachamanca (meaning "earth pot" in Quechua) is an Andean manner of cooking where you either dig a hole in the earth or make a brick oven, build a fire and heat very hard stones over it. You then remove the stones from the fire, fill the oven with various types of potatoes and sweet potatoes , cover those with rocks, and then layer various types of meats with hot rocks, before coving the whole thing in rocks and topping it with fava beans. You then wrap the whole oven in wet cardboard, followed by plastic tarps, followed by blankets, and seal it so no heat escapes. Then you let everything cook at this super hot temperature for 30 minutes to an hour, and then uncover it all and dig in! Traditionally, you stand over the oven and eat everything fresh from the oven with your hands. We started that way, and then moved things over to plates :)

Here is a picture guide from start to finish of how to make Pachamanca - plus a few other recipe goodies I learned that day.

3 weeks in Huaycán

I have now been living in Lima, Perú in a suburb northeast of downtown at the foothills of the Andes called Huaycán. Why am I back in Perú? Wasn't I just here in June?

I'm here because I left my job in Colorado to search for a job in International Development, and I was hired by a Lima nonprofit named The Light and Leadership Initiative (LLI) to be their Program Director...

...which is turning out to be exactly the job I was looking for!

I arrived here a little over three weeks ago, and I am excited to say that - after observing all the programs and operation of LLI - I feel extremely lucky and honored to have been chosen for this position, and I feel that I will both do well at and excel in my new job. The nonprofit is quite well integrated into the local community, it attracts like-minded volunteers who are positive and engaged in their work, and it is working hard to educate and empower local residents. This is the kind of career I dreamed of having when I decided to study international development.

What I've been working on since I arrived started mostly as orientation, training, and observation. The program has English, art, reading, chess, women's, and teen programs that I've been attending and helping with. I have also been shadowing on parent visits, where we go to the homes of the parent of our kids and speak to them about the child's progress and notify them about program dates and events. We work in three "zones" (zones S, Z, and D) of Huaycán where we have classrooms. We go to the different zones because the ones higher on the hill (S and Z) tend to be poorer - one of the families we went to on a parent visit stated that they did not even have money to send their child to school in a nearby zone - a bus ride that costs 1.20 soles ($0.41) round trip.

Here are some cute pictures of our younger participants in art class in Zone S:

Iquitos/Amazons recap

Seguido en Español

We were in Iquitos from 6/13/14 through 6/18/14. This is a city that is just a 10 minute boat ride away from the Amazon river. It is very hot and humid, and very much reminded me of coastal Central America.

There were some amazing nonprofits and government agencies in Iquitos. I was very impressed with the efforts that the people involved in human rights here made. There is a particularly poor shanty town community here called Belen where much of the human trafficking happens (which is primarily in logging and the sex industry). This community is on the shore of the main river that separates Iquitos from the Amazon. When that river floods every year, these people are displaced from their homes. The government subsidizes their building material costs and the costs of construction, but does not subsidize a location that would allow the community to not have to rebuild and repair yearly. 

We arrived just before the weekend, and took the weekend to do some sight-seeing. Saturday we took a day-long boat tour of the Amazon. We got to go to a wildlife refuge for animals that had been domesticated and then were no longer wanted by their owners. I had a little capuchin monkey friend that decided to be my scarf for the time we were there. I also got to hold a baby sloth, who - looking back on it - was very distressed about a leaf stuck on its left claw. There was also a toucan - those things make very loud clacking noises with their beaks, it was kind of terrifying to have it on my arm. 

We also got to meet some Amazonian tribe members, shoot a blowgun, do a traditional dance, and get our faces painted with red achiote stripes. We saw a humongous tree, ate jungle cuisine (aka this fish -and later this fish), and fished for piranhas (not really fished, more like watched them attack the chicken bits we put on a string).

Here are pictures of the Amazon trip:

Shooting a blowgun.
Disparando una cerbatana.

Cusco recap

From 6/6/14 to 6/13/14 we were in Cusco, in Southern Peru.

Much of Cusco was the same as Lima - a lot of time spent tracking down people to interview about human trafficking and conducting interviews. I can't give any names of organizations though because of the confidentiality of the project, sorry to be so general! We did find that the most common form of trafficking in Cusco is domestic servitude - often people in the city will tell a distant relative or acquaintance in the surrounding villages that they will take in a child in order to feed and educate them in the city. When the child arrives at that house they often do domestic work and nannying in the most basic living conditions, while none of the promises of care or schooling are fulfilled.

In between meetings I was able to explore the Cusco market (my favorite - filled with cocoa beans, delicious Andean cheese, and potatoes galore), go on a horseback ride to some ruins with Chris, and spend time weaving through the side streets. It was Cusco's anniversary as well, so there were plays, music, and dancing in the main plaza all week.

I also got quite ill from one of my meals (not sure what did me in). It was the night before I was supposed to go to Puerto Maldonado in the Madre de Dios region with Chris, and unfortunately it took several days for me to recover and I was unable to accompany him. I find it quite ironic that when I lived in Peru for 6 months I did not get sick once, but one week after coming back I get food poisoning! Like Chris says, eating the food here is like playing Russian Roulette, there was no avoiding it.

Other than my one food fiasco, I did get to enjoy some of my favorite Peruvian foods like anticuchos de corazón (grilled beef heart), chicha de quinua (a fermented quinoa drink) and aged queso Andino (Andean cheese) with eggs on fresh french bread.

Here are some Cusco photos:

 Children doing traditional dances in the Plaza de Armas (main square) for Cusco's anniversary.

 Incan flags outside one of the main cathedrals. Many of these cathedrals were built by the Spanish using the stones taken from the Incan temples as a method of subjugating the religion.

Lima recap

After we started our project in Peru, I ran out of time to blog!

These posts are written after I returned to the US just to summarize what I did in Peru and give some pictures :)

We were in Lima from 5/31/14 through 6/6/14, and then we returned at the end of the trip from 6/18/14 through 6/21/14. There, we spent our time in the Miraflores, San Isidro, Magdalena del Mar and San Miguel districts meeting with the individuals and organizations working against human trafficking. There are many forms of trafficking in Lima, mostly domestic and commercial labor, factories, begging, and prostitution.

At  the end of our trip, we were fortunate enough to be invited to the National Conference regarding human trafficking, where the biggest governmental & NGO human rights groups conducted workshops and presentations about human trafficking law and statistics in Peru and other Latin American countries like Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and El Salvador. 

Otherwise, we spent our free time enjoying Lima's food scene, exploring downtown Lima where we explored government buildings and the catacombs of the Church of San Francisco,  and wandering around Miraflores where there are beautiful parks and an excellent view of the sea.

Here are some of my favorite Lima photos:

 Fries at our favorite creole sandwich restaurant, La Lucha

 One of the native birds in the sanctuary and park Bosque El Olivar in San Isidro

 The inside of the Municipal Palace of Lima

Lima

Hola a todos,

As you may or may not know, I came to Lima about two days ago. The journey took just over 24 hours because apparently Denver is not a major hub for flights to Peru. But I made it!

Our reason for coming was in order to do quantitative research through surveys for Chris' anti-human trafficking research project that we are doing in conjunction with a professor and grad student of the University of Denver. Our travel companions don't arrive in Lima until 12am tonight, so we have not started on the project just yet.

We have spent our first two days in Lima basking in its culinary genius. Our favorite thing about Peru is the food, so we were extremely excited to eat all of our favorite things and re-visit our favorite places (and maybe find some new things) before beginning our research.

First, we went to La Lucha Sanguchería Criolla, which is among our favorite places in the world. I have no pictures of La Lucha because we were pretty concentrated on our food at the time. We may or may not have gone there three times already since arriving.

We also went for a run on a park that runs along the cliffs overlooking the ocean where you see all the new surfers falling off their surfboards and the Limeños walking their dogs dressed in sweaters and skirts.

Later, we went to Mercado Surquillo, where we ate some amazing, fresh ceviche with canchita (puffed corn) and caldo de pescado (fish broth with lime and cilantro) while listening to a couple play huayno (traditional Andean music).

El Super Pollón II

Today we cooked a mini pterodactyl!!

Kraawww!!

Just kidding.

We just really missed pollo a la brasa from our Peru days.

Pollo a la brasa is Peruvian style rotisserie chicken. It can be made with any combination of things, but we brined ours for about 20 hours in a mix of beer, chicken broth, cumin, annatto, garlic, salt & pepper, and soy sauce. We then hung the sucker up to dry for an hour, rubbed it down with salt, pepper, oil, and lime juice, and rotisserie'd it for an hour or two. And we made...this! :

Nutty

This is one of the things about living in a different country than the United States: you crave peanut butter, but you can't buy it.

So I did what was necessary.

Unfortunately, I have heard about blenders breaking while trying to make peanut butter, so my blender was not an option. Neither was my nonexistent food processor or electric grinder. There was only one option left...




...el Molino

Spiny, creepy things...(la caigua chilena, en Inglés y Español)

(Mire por abajo para Español)

Once upon a time in Peru, my host dad came home towing a vine-full of spiny, dirty, green things...

so I cooked them!



The caigua chilena is an anomaly, I couldn't find anything on it online--when you search the internet, it only comes up with "caigua", and it's a different vegetable.

I was using the oven for something else and kind of annoyed that this pokey thing was taking up all my kitchen space, so I chucked them into an empty shelf in the oven

And out came something delicious! The peel and seed came right off, and I was left with something that was a weird mix between an artichoke, Chinese winter melon, and chayote.



The first time I made it I made this crazy spicy orange sauce from basically everything that was in our fridge, cooked chopped caigua chilena in it, and covered the whole thing in cheese--my family loved it.

This time, I cooked it for an hour in the pressure cooker (the thing wasn't only spiny, it was a brick), took off the peel and seed, chopped it, fried it, and put it in a Chinese "mapo" (麻婆) sauce that I learned from my host mom in Japan.

and BAM! Chinese food deliciousness!




"Mapo Caigua"

-3 caiguas, boiled until completely tender, with the skin and seed removed
-1 onion, cut in big chunks
-vegetable oil for frying the caigua

SAUCE:
-1 tsp. tojan chili sauce or Chinese pepper garlic sauce
-1/2 onion, minced
-1 inch. chunk of peeled ginger, minced
-5 cloves garlic, minced
-1 Tbs. sake
-1/3 c. white or rice vinegar
-1/2 tsp. salt
-1/4 tsp pepper
-1/2 c. water mixed with 1/2 Tbs. corn starch
-3 Tbs. soy sauce

METHOD:
Cut the caigua into big chunks, and fry in oil until golden brown. Set on paper towel to drain.

Mix all the ingredients for the sauce BUT the water with starch and soy sauce together in a bowl. Set aside.

Put a pot over medium-high heat, and pour 2 Tbs. sesame oil in the pot. When the oil is hot (you can smell it), throw the chopped onion into the oil, and cook until it begins to turn brown (but not so that it starts shrinking). Add the caigua and the prepared sauce, and stir. Cook for 5 minutes over medium heat. Clear a spot in the pot, and drop the soy sauce in--it should start boiling immediately. After a few seconds, stir it in. While stirring it so the starch doesn't clump, add the water with starch. Cook over medium-high heat until it thickens, about 5 minutes.

Serve over piping hot rice, and maybe with some fried wonton skins :)



NOTE!
I realize that a caigua chilena will not be sold in your local piggly-wiggly. That said, this recipe would go wonderfully with a chayote, which you should find at any local Latin-food store. Otherwise, just make it the traditional with pan-fried tofu and it is equally delicious. Use your imagination--just about every other vegetable out there would be delicious with this.



ESPAÑOL

Una vez, mi padre anfitrión trajo a la casa una vina llenada de cosas espinadas, sucias, y verdes.

entonces las cociné!

La caigua chilena es anomalía, no pude encontrar nada sobre lo por internet. Cuando buscas, solamente viene páginas de la caigua, una verdura muy diferente.

Yo estaba usando el horno, y le me molestaba solamente sentando en la encimera, pues se eché adentro el horno.

...¡y salió algo rico! La piel y la semilla se separaron fácilmente, y dejo algo parecido a una mezcla extraña de alcachofa, chayote, y melón de invierno (benincasa hispida, un tipo de melón de Asia).

La primera vez que los cociné, hice una salsa picante de ají amarillo y queso. La familia anfitriona le gustó

La segunda vez, los herví en la olla de presión para cerca de una hora, y los guisé como una comida china, "Mapo". Usualmente mapo contiene carne molida y carne de soya, pero la salsa tambien se puede usar con otras cosas.


MAPO CAIGUA

-3 caiguas chilenas, hervidas, con la piel y semilla sacadas
-1 cebolla, picada
-Aceite para freír las caiguas

Para la salsa:
-1 cucharilla chile fresco molido (como rocoto o jalapeño)
-Mitad de una cebolla, picada muy fina
-2 pulgadas de jengibre pelado, picada muy fina
-5 dientes ajo, picados
-1 Tbs. sake (vino de arroz), o otro liquor blanca como pisco
-1/3 taza vinaigre blanco
-1/2 cucharilla sal
-1/4 cucharilla pimienta
-1/2 taza agua, mezclado con 1/2 cucharón fécula de maíz
-3 cucharones de salsa de soya (sillao)

Direcciones:

Corta las caiguas en cubos, y fríen en el aceite hasta están doradas. Ponga en una toalla de papel para que puede escurrir el aceite.

Mezcla todas las ingredientes EXCEPTO el agua con fécula en un plato ondo, y dejarlo a un lado.

Ponga una olla sobre fuego medio, y vierta 2 cucharones de aceite de ajonjolí adentro. Cuando está caliente (y puede olerlo), se echa la cebolla, y cocine hasta pone dorada. Añada la caigua y la salsa preparada, y revuelva para 5 minutos. Añada la salsa de soya, y mezclarlo. Revueva el agua con fécula de nuevo, y agregue a la olla. Cocine sobre fuego medio-fuerte hasta cuando la salsa hace gruesa.

Sirve encima de arroz caliente, y talvez wontons fritos :)


NOTA:
Porque el sabor no es muy fuerte (es poco dulce, y la textura es suave), se puede usar la caigua chilena en vez de otras verduras en cualquier plato. Pienso que sea rica en salsas italianas (como de espagueti), o en platos saltados asiáticos.