Unsettling Down

Following five days of refuge from reality climbing around the Andes, we returned to a life less than ordinary in Cusco, Peru.  Promptly after we arrived back at the orphanage, we were joined by all of the children from the boys orphanage along with all of their beds, toys and other equipment.  As if suddenly living beneath almost twenty hyperactive boys didn’t make life hectic enough here, our goodbye dinner for a group of girls heading off to Bolivia was interrupted by news that one of our housemates had been diagnosed with what was most likely swine flu at a clinic here.

I haven’t been going out of my way to keep ahead on British news whilst out in Latin America – the only thing to hit us from the Western world in recent weeks being the shock death of Micheal Jackson; speaking of whom his music can now be heard upon walking into every other shop, even out here in Cusco.  However, as we were waiting for our pizza and chicken to arrive at a local restaurant called Mia’s last friday; panic swept across the table.  “Is David going to be okay.“Can we still go to Bolivia??“.  “Did you know that recently somebody died from swine flu in England with no underlying symptoms???“.

As two of us have just finished our first year at medical school we were able to reassure the other volunteers that they weren’t all going to die.  We did find ourselves in a bit of a surreal atmosphere though; stuck in the middle of a global pandemic whilst in Peru.  Our inital plans to visit a series of four Incan ruins within walking distance of Cusco were delayed as we expected a health official to be coming to test us for the virus the next day.  Whereas in England where anybody in contact with somebody testing positive for H1N1 would be checked out immediately; the health authorities in Peru don’t seem as concerned or as well equipped in containing the virus.  Nobody did come to test us, and as it turned out that the person who had had the most contact with the guy with pig flu tested negative, and it would set us back 140 soles to sate our curiosity, we opted out.

The following days brought conflicting news from the clinic.  Yes, he has swine flu.  No, it’s just a similar strain.  No, it almost definitely is swine flu.  Whilst I can only speak as far as the system goes in Peru – apparently two tests are used to check antibodies for the H1N1 virus.  A cheaper Korean test with a very high incidence of false-negatives and a more expensive test from America – however with an accuracy alleged to be only sixty percent it sounded like little more than a coin toss.  Some of us went to visit David where he was staying at Clínica San José.  The place has been built recently, within the last two years and it’s impeccably clean and very spacious, and furthermore very empty.  Either as a form of quarantine or simply because the majority of people here can’t afford to stay at such a nice hospital, David seemed to have an entire floor to himself at the top of the building.  A large spacious room with a TV, sofas and an en-suite bathroom – whilst complete with lifeless beige hospital walls and an aroma of antiseptic – just think of a hosptial in a developing country and never would you imagine this luxury.

Apparently only the tenth recorded case of swine flu in the city, following five days in isolation at a hotel in town I believe as I write this my friend is on his flight back to the UK.  Having travelled since January on his gap year, it’s a dramatic way to draw it to a close although surely not one somebody would wish for.  Though the threat of swine flu quickly dissipated, the other volunteers began to drop like flies – with diagnoses of acute bronchitis, laryngitis and even mountain sickness linked pneumonia putting my friends in the hands of the local healthcare systems here.  From my outside perspective they seem very competant, but it’s difficult to imagine the feeling of being confined in a room for however many days in a faraway country, in addition to wrestling with a foreign language.

Speaking of language, as my grasp of Castellano advances by the day as I start to understand what the signs and bilboards decorating the city actually mean, and become more friendly with the locals; I fear that it is concurrently forcing my knowledge of Japanese out of the other side of my brain.  I recently spoke with a friend over Skype and our Japanese conversation was full of Spanish interjections, as unconciously my ‘hai’s turned into ’si’s and my grammar was so backwards I may as well have been talking in reverse.  Perhaps we have a part in our brains to process our mother tongue, and all of our foreign language knowledge is crammed away into a little corner elsewhere, free to coalesce, converge and confuse.

The smallest nuances in differing languages can change the feel of the same sentence remarkably.  I can say “let’s go!” in English.  Or “iku zo!” in Japanese.  “vamos!”, in Castellano.  Each has such a distinctive feel and mood, every language has its own personality; and for me one of the biggest draws of studying foreign langauges is that it grants one the ability to think in different ways, see the world in glasses tinted with a different shade.  As my progress in Castellano eats away at my Japanese like a parasite I can feel that part of my personality slipping away like sand in an hourglass.  It really is quite scary, but I’m hopeful that by glancing at a couple of mangas I brought with me about a newly qualified doctor and by taking every chance I can to speak a bit of the language, I can keep a hold of it long enough to bring it back to London where I can use it in day-to-day life.

Like I mentioned earlier, only days after we came back from our Salkantay trek we were helping to haul heavy parts of beds, bookshelves, cupboards and boxes of miscellaneous content from a moving van up to the very top of the five-storey girls orphanage – actually now just the orphanage as all thirty-odd kids are in the same place now.  The old boys orphanage back in Zarzuela, the poorest district of Cusco, is being demolished and rebuilt over the next six months into something better.  Just as we were beginning to get into a routine by teaching the boys in the morning at their orphanage, that whole system has gone to pot.  As you might imagine, as the boys have not just moved into a new house in a different part of town, but they’re also sharing it with fifteen or so girls they have gone completely loco.

Whilst a dog barking rabidly into the night and made it difficult to get to sleep previously, now in the early morning hours it isn’t the cry of a cuckoo but the stampede of children up and down the stairs which wakes us as the sun rises.  As soon as one of them wakes up, they all do, and the whole building shakes as they seem to run up and down mindlessly.  Luckily for them they’re now living minutes away from a football and basketball court which takes up some of their excessive energy.  Although a new orphanage is being built for them and I’m sure it’ll be well equipped and worth the effort to upgrade, I can’t imagine them wanting to leave after six months or so when they’ve settled down again.

We have managed to tame them at times, some of the volunteers are quite arty and brought a load of materials with them, so we helped the kids to make some papier-mâché balloons and paint them the next day.  After finding some instructions online we did a few little science experiments – showing them how to make lava lamps with oil, water and food colouring (here substituted with the local drink chicha-morada); and then we took them outside to make an erupting volcano with washing up liquid, vinegar and baking soda.  Although the science was probably lost on them they enjoyed the show and had fun attacking each other with washing up liquid afterwards.

Besides trying to entertain and educate the children and visiting my sick friends in hosptial, myself and some of the other volunteers have been taking the opportunity to be a bit touristy in Cusco.  To do this you need to buy the boleto de turistico.  For a student, the 10 day pass is 70 soles, but it’s double if you don’t have a valid student card.  140 soles seems quite extortionate to visit a few old ruins and some very minor museums in town when you consider that a five day trek to Machu Picchu can be found for as little as 400-odd.  Although a few of my friends were coughing their guts up with bronchitis and other assorted ailments, we soldiered through and after taking a cheap local bus out of town, we walked back in stopping at four Incan settlements.  From the furthest away they are called Tambomachay, Pukapukara, Q’enko, and finally Sacsayhuamán – usually pronounced as ’sexy woman’.  After the wonders of Machu Picchu the first three sites were fairly lacklustre.  Sexy Woman, on the other hand, is an architectural masterpiece comprising of irregularly shaped stones some over seventy stones in weight, fitting together into a tight mosaic with no need for superfluous concrete.

The next weekend I set off around the town of Cusco with my friend Maddy to try and get a bit more value for money from our boleto turisticos, visiting four museums scattered around the square, most of them only containing a small spattering of trinkets which looked little more impressive than the things being peddled by the thousands of hawkers around the town – little wooden dolls and tacky necklaces.  In one of the small museums we were puzzled to see enclosed in a glass case some ancient artifacts; some empty cola bottles and a few lollipops and bon-bons in plastic wrappers.  When you visit any of these places, there are officials at the entrances to stamp your ticket meaning you can only visit them once.  I expect that the tourism board could make more money charging at individual venues but then again I’m sure we wouldn’t have visited half of the places unless we’d paid for them already.

Our final stop was the town of Pisaq.  Less of a town and more of just a market actually, as we could clearly see after climbing to the top of its neighbouring mountain, itself sporadically dotted with old Incan ruins.  As stunning as the scenery here is and as marvellous as Incan construction is, even today, everybody reaches a limit where enough is enough.  An Incan ruin is an Incan ruin is an Incan ruin, and my feet are getting itchy to get out and see something a bit different.  All the better then, that my days here in Cusco are almost up.

Three months ago, at the end of April, I pushed my body to the limit by running the London Marathon.  I was undertrained for it, having injured my knee with embarrassing ease about six weeks previous whilst walking home from the union inebriated, but I still managed to run the whole 26 and a bit miles and come out smiling.  I did hobble for the next week though and wasn’t able to take stairs up nor down at more than snail-pace without swearing to myself like a trooper.

In recent days I’ve started to run again, this time at the high-altitude of Cusco.  Whilst in the beginning I felt like I was moments away from collapsing it’s helped me to acclimatise to the conditions here and prevented me from getting any more of a beer gut from the local drinks.  It may also be part of the reason why I’m one of the only ones in our group who hasn’t fallen ill over the last two weeks; although I think I came close to hypothermia when I accidently forgot my keys and had to sit the night out!

I know many people don’t enjoy running, finding it boring and pointless.  I understand some of the reasoning; it is pretty bad for your legs in the long-term, even whilst it’s good for general fitness.  My university gym subscription ran out after the first term and I never once considered renewing it.  There is nothing more dull than running in a gym – it’s a pretty loathesome atmosphere to begin with, what with clinical whitewashed walls, speakers booming cheesy music and weights areas surrounded with mirrors as young Narcissi gaze at their mutations in the mirror goading each other on to “man up, MAN UP!”.

However, I’ve fallen in love with running after deciding impulsively to run the marathon earlier in the year.  There’s a hidden art in running in the outdoors as even on the same roads, everybody will have their own route which is personal to them, everybody makes a personal decision on where they put their feet as they dodge around obstacles and people, dancing around the traffic both pedestrian and motor.  It can be beautiful running through trees in the early morning as the moon fades into blue and opposite the sky screams out in red as the sun makes its entrance.  Here some of the traffic lights come not just with the little red, little green man but also a countdown so people know how much time they really have left, and motorists know when they can start revving their engines.  It’s pretty exciting seeing the green sign in the distance go 6, 5, 4…  Can I make it? 3, 2, 1, as I jump back onto the pavement on the other side and continue along past the pedestrian cattle taking photographs in all directions, oohing and aahing.  I don’t see many other people running; certainly not compared to being back in London but that makes it all feel a bit more special and a little more unique.

There’s the music you listen to as well, and I feel myself speeding up with the tempo as a powerful riff gives me another boost of energy from somewhere inside.  The roads are very uneven here and you find yourself having to dodge pot-holes, instead running along angled walls, your entire body twisting to the contours like a motorcycle sticking to the road as it makes a tight turn.  You find yourself zoning in and out of the music, as your attention jumps between the scenes encircling you and the traffic threatening.  As I’m making my way back from the Plaza on the easy downhill road back the lyrics come back into my attention just in time to hear Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie singing into my ears, “The hardest part is yet to come, and you will cross the country alone”.

Earlier today I paid Jeremy for my four weeks of accommodation and for a steal of 20 soles I booked my overnight bus ticket for Puno: border city of Peru and Bolivia and on the edge of lake Titicaca.  I’ve had my four weeks here, settling into the Latin American life and language and getting humanitarian points by looking after children in an orphanage.  On Wednesday I’m hitting the road, and with no more than a cheap bus ticket and a lot of ideas I’m off to see what’s waiting on the way.

¡Chau!

Tommy