Wednesday, August 6, 2008

To Speak of the Chacras

i am sorry that i have not been very faithful in updating lately. There is really no legitimate excuse… and it looks like i will not get very close to caught up to the end of the trip before i make it home.

So if there is any interest whatsoever… i suppose that i will continue the blog at least until i finish an overview of my time in Peru after i get home.

i’m going to try really hard for this update to be less than 700 pages long. Please forgive me if i fail in the matter.

i think i’m going to continue with Choco pictures for a little while… this post is going to be a photo essay detailing a little bit of the work done in the fields around Choco. i traveled to fields with Juana Lupaca Blanco on two separate occasions and tried to document the goings on. This series is almost a month and a half old now… so my memory might be a little bit hazy (and i’m not going to go back and read through my notes on the occasions right now)… but i think i won’t be lying to you… too much.

But before i go there… i thought that i would provide a picture of the overly kind missionaries with whom i have been staying in Trujillo. So here, ladies and gentlemen, are Eric and Lora Karraker… or Lora and Eric Karraker, as they appear in this picture.



So… Choco is located in the bottom of a canyon. The village itself fills the only nearly-flat ground in the area, and is braced on all sides by near-vertical cliffs. The fields, then, are often a fairly long walk away, cut out into the mountainsides in the form of terraces.

In this picture, Juana’s donkeys are on their way to one of her fields. The donkeys are necessary to transport whatever is harvested back to her house… and on particularly long trips are occasionally ridden for a while.



Upon arriving at her field on this particular day, we began by collecting the two mature avocados in her tree. We started by throwing rocks at them to knock them down… but after i notched a direct hit to no avail, we decided to try a different tactic. Juana saw a 12-15 foot tree branch a short distance away and charged off to bring it back.

Upon arriving, we quickly were able to use it to knock the avocados down. She kind of liked the thing, though, and so decided to hide it so that she would be able to use it in the future. She climbed up to the edge of one of her terraces and lowered it out of view down the other side.


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After collecting the avocados and hiding the branch, Juana began picking cactus fruit—tuna. Here she holds out a peeled tuna for me. Yum.



Juana finished off the day by harvesting some corn. She first picked the ears off of the stalks, and then cut the stalks down to take back to her home to feed to her donkeys and sheep.



And i suppose that a fitting close would be a portrait of Juana in her field… so here you go.



Very well… in a few hours i will be leaving Trujillo for Lima, where i will arrive fairly early in the morning tomorrow. i will be spending three days and two nights in Lima before flying back to the states. i hope to get one more update written… but i don’t know how much freedom i will have to do so in Lima. So this may be the last one before i get home.

To all who have faithfully followed this blog… i hope you know that i have appreciated your interest, even that of those who have lurked but not commented.

And… i’m not kidding. Buy me coffee when i get home :-)

Would that i were two, he said, a dark and snowy night.

3 comments:

beersville said...

What a wonderful picture of Juana! I particularly liked the one with her proudly displaying the Tuna! What wonderful hands and face.
I'd really like to meet her someday.

Anonymous said...

JUANA!!!
oooh, juana. :)

Anonymous said...

Not going to update this thing anymore?