En Route

3:45 AM: And here we are again, another all-nighter at the Lima airport.  Exhausted and smelly after three flights and the predictably long wait at customs (not to mention some exciting early morning post-caucus traffic at the DMI airport), I am back in Peru, the land of the Ñañas.  The six months home in Iowa flew by, and now all that stands between me and my dear Ñañas is the 6:45 AM flight from Lima to Arequipa.  Almost there...

[Sleep-deprived and sipping some ridiculously overpriced Starbucks tea, the price one must pay for an internet connection here.]

A very broad summary of the months lapsed since the last post: After departing Peru in mid-July, I spent almost six months home with friends and family and the beautiful concept of regular business hours.  Chiri-wise, the months were eventful and generally quite positive ones, if sometimes a bit overwhelming.

A few highlights: The sweaters and accessories we thought would never leave the workshop made their way box by box from Arequipa to our doorsteps in Des Moines -- occasionally detouring through customs in Miami --where tags were lovingly and laboriously attached by my dear mother (need a blanket stitch?  She's your gal.).  Lexi and I made seemingly unending pilgrimages to Joann's and Hancock franchises throughout the Midwest, armed with notions coupons to buy the precious buttons and snaps that we kept buying out in Des Moines.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Portland a magic elf designer named Jamie Letourneau was hard at work creating the Chiri logo, selecting a font and then making rubber stamps of our logo and hand-dying and stamping each hang tag that accompanied all 300+ garments.  (Yes, we are forever indebted to her.)  The ladies kept up their work in Peru with almost, almost, no glitches; our website went up; I took three two-hour classes on small business accounting followed by a crash course in Quickbooks with Lexi's Aunt Kitty and somehow seemed to make it through our meeting with our accountant; Lexi meticulously packed up and shipped out multiple orders to ten stores around the Midwest, including the Des Moines Art Center Gift Shop and Back Country Outfitters in Des Moines; we paid visits to three of the Twin Cities stores selling the Chiri line and found our clients to be generally thrilled with the product; and somewhere in the midst of all this, plans got under way for round two.

So here we are.  It's now 2012, and a new season has begun.  It was an incredible first year with the Chiri project, and we're ready for more.  But before we throw ourselves into the next round, I want to thank everyone for all of your support.  Whether it was sending positive thoughts our way, giving us tips on potential stores where we could sell the line, sewing on labels or watching for the UPS van and calling to let us know a travel-worn box had arrived, your contributions have made this possible.  Gracias y feliz año nuevo!

[As it turned out, I made it through another night at the airport, but the plane to Arequipa that took off Thursday morning was forced to return to Lima after Arequipa's haze didn't let up for us to land, so we were switched to another plane in Lima and lucky enough to make it through on the second try, arriving around 1:30.  A long 30 hours.]

Huambo: Getting there

My next trip after Puno was to Huambo, a small village tucked away in the mountains near Colca Canyon, unmentioned in tour books but famous for being the hometown of Frida, one of the original Ñañas I met my first time down to Peru and a dear friend.  Over the years she'd often spoken proudly of her tierra and told me I had to visit one day so I was ready to go when she invited me to accompany her and her sister's family on their trek home for Holy Week. 

I met Frida and her twin sister, Miriam, at the bus station before dawn on Good Friday and we boarded with passengers weighed down by bags of produce and other goods to take home to their families in the mountains.  Two hours later we arrived at the town of Pedregal where Miriam's husband and son were waiting for us at the home of Frida's younger sister Adelaide.  There we also met our trusty steed, a green 1980s Toyota pickup truck which was to take us the four-hour ride to Huambo.  Above, Frida, Gabriel (Miriam's son), Miriam, and Adelaide's two children, Emily and Joel.

Although a bus makes the trip from Pedregal to Huambo once a day, they had decided we would drive ourselves instead so we could stop off where we wanted and have a more tranquilo (calm) trip.  Little did we know...

Above, Nelson gets ready to close the hood after some final tuneups, and below, Miriam waits with little Emily next to Adelaide's house.  The family moved to Pedregal from Lima less than a year ago, so they're still getting accustomed to their new life in the small town.  The woven reeds in the photo are the walls of the house, and the roof is made of the same material.  This type of structure is a common starter house, always with the hopes of moving to more permanent materials like sillar, the volcanic stone common in the area, when enough money is saved up.

An hour later we were off, three of us up front and three nestled into the back of the truck with the provisions we were taking to Frida's parents in Huambo.

The photos below were taken on the first leg of the trip and remind me a lot of the scenery I saw on the bus trip down the coast from Lima in 2006.  The little boxy structures are makeshift homes made from the same material used on Adelaide's house and represent a leap of faith that is still rather unfathomable to me.   While it's not difficult to understand what would send people away from tiny towns with no running water, electricity, medical care and schools in search of a better life, I still struggle to see how such a bleak, seemingly uninhabitable landscape could be a place of hope for a better future for the people who settle there.

Still, the houses made of sillar below with the beginnings of another piled in the foreground show that for some, that hope is not unfounded and progress does come with time. 

The canal in the photo below is another source of hope as it brings water from the mountains near Huambo to make irrigated agriculture possible in the middle of the desert.  I didn't get my camera out in time to capture it, but I was stunned to see stretches of deep, vibrant green in the midst of the dry expanse, and Nelson explained it was the result of this newly available water source.  I don't know how sustainable it is or how people gain access to it, but it certainly brings new possibilities to the area.

Unfortunately, the future wasn't looking quite so bright for our truck and before we'd been on the road an hour we had to stop so Nelson could fiddle with tires that had locked up. Luckily he had a really supportive team of back-seat mechanics to help him out, and we were back on the road again before we'd fallen too far behind schedule.

As we continued towards Huambo, we wound our way around mountains on the dirt road and steadily made our way up...

... which eventually led to two more maintenance stops, each one longer than the last.  Our truck was obviously less than pleased with the direction our trip was taking us.

  

While the stops made us more and more nervous as the day wore on, they did give us a chance to stretch our legs and take in some of the views.

You can see how varied the vegetation and mountains themselves were as we progressed along our route.

 

What appear to be clouds in the distance in the photo below are actually snow caps of the mountains near Huambo. 

Shadows were getting longer, stress levels were increasing and we were still without cell phone service when we made our fifth stop, 

but Nelson and his endless stores of patience and resourcefulness finally won out and he coaxed the green beast into carrying us up the final ascent then down into Huambo.  We pulled in, tired but victorious, eight hours after we'd begun our journey from Pedregal (and over 12 hours since we'd left Arequipa), and were greeted by the relieved family of Frida who was just getting ready to head out for Good Friday festivities...

Papas con queso, a la puneña -- Potatoes and cheese, Puno style

Special potatoes had been the Ñañas' request when I asked what they wanted me to bring back for them from Puno, so Alex and I stopped by the local market before leaving town and went from stall to stall asking the caseritas -- an affectionate term used for the ladies who sell their produce in the market -- for recommendations.

There are literally thousands of varieties of potatoes in Peru and the selection in this tiny market alone was a little overwhelming, but eventually we settled on the imilla negra, a small, softer potato with a beautiful purple skin. 

Back at the workshop, the puneñas (women from Puno) of the group approved of our choice and soon had the potatoes boiling away while Andrea cut up the cheese Alex had sent along from La Joya.

No knife to cut the cheese?  No problem.  Always resourceful, Andrea found a clean knitting needle and went to work.   Here, Maria Luz helps herself to a potato while Andrea doles out the cheese.