Beginning the Independent Study Project

                Here I am at the beginning of November which means in my SIT program: the start of the month long research project we all conduct independently. It also means no more classes. I guess I’ve basically been out of class for the past 3 weeks, but have been working on organizing my project which I’ll explain a bit further down.

                It’s been awhile since my last entry, but this program is jam packed of classes, excursions, trips, interactions, host family time, etc etc. But I should start with what’s been happening since I travelled to the Amazon.

Iquitos – city of rubber

                We arrived in Iquitos, eager to get out of Cusco for a bit and explore the Amazon. We arrived to the Iquitos airport and left the plane to meet an immense humidity and heat that no one was ready for—especially after living at 11,000ft in the mountains. We could breathe! We could also sweat… and we sweat a lot. We spent a few days in the city of Iquitos which began as a missionary post for the jungle. The city passed through a city of revivals and boosts through the rubber industry especially during the end of the 19^th century and during the world wars. The production of rubber in this region has ended, moved on to southern Asia and now the city is an oasis in the middle of the jungle.

                In Iquitos, we walked through the streets, enjoying wearing shorts and t-shirts for the first time since summer in the States. We went to a huge street market where we were bombarded with clothes, gizmos and gadgets aplenty, and places to buy chopped up turtle and cooked larvae. Yummy. It was weird going from the Andes Mountains to the Amazon Basin in only a few hours. Technology is magic!

                We found the favorite local bar ‘Margaritaville’ just kidding super touristy, but I laughed at the title. Apparently the owner of the bar bought out the copyright for the WHOLE country of Peru, so, I am very proud to say that I dined and drank at the one and only Peruvian Margaritaville. Sorry, Jimmy Buffett. We left Iquitos after a few days to head into the Amazon – legit.

Pacaya Samiria – the community of Veinte de Enero

                This is a community about 3 hours down the river from Iquitos. We rode in long narrow boats deeper and deeper into the Amazon. I couldn’t help but think about the Amazon Trail. We arrived to Veinte de Enero (20^th of January) a small, quaint campesino community that thrives off tourism and the production of aguaje, a crazy fruit that has a ton of weird capabilities and is currently being used for make-up production.

                Here we stayed in two different cabins and enjoyed the heat (I sweat a lot) and the nature. There were mosquitos galore, but luckily it isn’t a malaria zone (I didn’t take the pills). I got to hold a Boa constrictor that snuck into someone’s HOUSE in the community. Our guide was not fazed at all by it. He carried the snake in his backpack for about an hour hike then told us he was letting it go. Snake charming in the amazon.

                Here we were grouped into pairs to go do a series of interviews about our own personal topics. I stuck with tourism and effects on the community and set off to talk to some people. I got a lot of mixed reviews: tourism isn’t as strong as it was, tourism is great, and tourism is awful. It really depends on someone’s level of involvement in tourism. For instance, the man who said tourism isn’t as strong anymore, while he is a farmer, his family is involved in artisan crafts and souvenirs. Ultimately, the tourists that come do not buy as much as they used to because of the ever-growing tourist market in the surrounding communities as well as Iquitos. The lady who said tourism was great worked as a cook for a tourist organization for several years and made good money. She currently is unemployed and doesn’t necessarily thrive off tourism anymore, but remembered very fondly her time as a chef. The man who said tourism is awful owns a small store in the community and has little to no involvement in tourism; however, he explained that every member of the community is required to aid in maintaining the community clean and expecting tourism in the community. Being a tourist in his community, I felt very uncomfortable, but at the same time eager to listen to show him that tourism is multifaceted.

                We were there for a few days and headed back to Iquitos and spent my friend’s birthday in Margaritaville.

Lima – capital of el Peru

                We spent a few days in Lima getting to know basically Miraflores, a very bougie neighborhood in Lima. I got to enjoy how different the regions of Peru are: from quaint, small Cusco, to booming Amazonian city to rich and humongous capital city. We had classes in both Iquitos and Lima about all sorts of topics from Amazon family structure, history, indigenous rights, the terrorism from Sendero Luminoso, urban immigration, etc etc. I wish I could’ve spent more time in Lima, as of yet I know very little of the city and even the structure.

                We spent one day going to the oldest archaeological site in South America and is deemed to be the 4^th oldest in the world: Caral. We went with a friend of the director of the program who actually got his doctorate from Pitt. Small world. Caral was beautiful and I think I posted some pictures of them—be sure to always check my flickr or facebook.

Quechua – Noqaqa manan rumasimitachu rimani

                ‘I don’t speak Quechua’ but I think it’s wrong. We spent the next two weeks after Lima in Cusco learning Quechua and continuing lectures from professors and community members about all sorts of things. Quechua is a beautiful language, but an indigenous language to several parts of South America, therefore a bit of a learning curve happened.

                After the two weeks, we had a test in the country in a community called Ccorcca. It was a beautiful community, very magical and eerie at the same time. I loved it and wish I had brought my camera, but I wasn’t quite sure what was happening.

                I think it’s safe to say I passed my Quechua exam. We learned very little, but just enough to get me excited to speak it more and more. But that didn’t really happen.

Puno, Colca, Arequipa – the south of Peru

                I’m a bit bored of writing right now and I am leaving tomorrow morning for Ocongate a community two hours away to do a week of research and then coming back to work more on my research project:

                Basically my premise is tourism and utilizing as my medium: woven textiles from indigenous communities. I am looking at how certain factors such as: exoticism, the ‘other’, agency, power, manipulation and performance, searching for the ‘authentic’, and capitalism play into economic transactions of buying and selling of textiles in the tourist market.

                My brain is a little dead and I keep thinking in Spanish syntax, yikes, but I would like to have a more well-developed blog that sounds more intelligent, but things keep getting more and more busy and backed up.

Juan

Why and How I am in Peru – a tale of Prostitution, Dictatorship and the Incas

                In my sophomore year of college I studied abroad for a semester in La Habana, Cuba. While I was there I experienced rarities that can only come with a country plastered between a globalizing economy of capitalism and an idyllic past of communism. I saw contraptions made from scrap, buildings transformed to accommodate growing families or new businesses, people hustling to get by—the average monthly salary for 2011 in Cuba was $19. Yikes. But they do get a ration card with certain amounts of food, so hey, at least they’re getting something else. I met amazing friends and went to incredible places and all in all I fell in love with the place, aww shucks. I knew I wanted to study abroad as much as possible, because why not? I was throwing around ideas in my head about something extremely different like Tibet, or maybe something more similar to my experiences like Brazil. But a new program was announced with SIT that was going to be in Cuba. Mmm, I thought, I know the place, I know some people—why not just go back in a legal way and do an amazing research project that is the main component of SIT. I was set. I was ready to get back to my Cuban friends and just get away again from school where every semester seems to get more and more monotonous.

                I applied and was ready to be accepted. Duh, look at my experience. But really I had to go through some interviews and change a bit of my application before I was finally accepted into a group of 15 students from across the country. I was proud. I was happy. I was going back to that crazy country only 90 geographic miles from Florida, but 9 million miles away thanks to a rocky history and insane politics. This is when I was considering doing a summer research project to get me prepared for the fall. I applied through the Office of Undergraduate Research and, thankfully, I was accepted into an awesome community full of equally diverse and marvelous people and research projects.

                What was my project you ask? Oh, you didn’t ask?

                Cuba is a strange place, we’ve established this. Granted, however, it is strange when juxtaposed with our society. It is so strange in that a pizza maker or a hotel employee can earn more money than an engineer or a doctor. Imagine. It’s hard to, when it’s been drilled into our heads how much money doctors and engineers and specialists make—not the case in Cuba. Socialism and communism reign supreme on paper in Cuba and therefore paychecks are dealt out in almost equal amounts. This does not take into account money that is handled under the table, outside of the formal economy, cash, etc. Not a lot of doctors and engineers make tips or set their own prices, but those in the service industry do. It’s my pizza shop, I pay a certain amount of money every month to the government, I’ll just raise the price a little bit to give me a nice little cushion and the government won’t be the wiser. And the government won’t because the Cuban bureaucracy is notoriously known to work about as well as a DMV in slow-mo. There’s even a movie about it.

                So what do you do when you don’t know how to make pizza or you can’t get the job in the fancy hotel? What if you don’t want to or can’t be a doctor or an engineer? What do you do if you have almost nothing? Well you can utilize the only resource you have, and most times than not, that resource is one’s body.

                Cuban prostitution is a phenomenon unlike “hotspots” of prostitution, for lack of a better word, such as Thailand or the Netherlands. In Cuba, there are no “pimps” or organized prostitution—and it is definitely not legal. In the Netherlands prostitution is nearly regulated and Thailand is self-regulated by those in control of the industry. In Cuba, there is no regulation (ironic being a communist country) and because of this lack of regulation, prices and issues of safety are ever changing. Prices are set by the tourist most cases than not, therefore Cuban prostitutes can be often left with little to sometimes no money.

                However, certain agency takes place from the side of the prostitute: they elaborate and elevate the level of exoticism already preconceived by tourists of Cuba: a Caribbean island, fascinating history, and of course ethnically diverse from a majority white North America/Europe. From this perspective one could easily argue WHO has the power in the situation? Who is manipulating and who is manipulated? How much does exoticism and authenticity play into the tourist experience in Cuba? What do new waves of capitalism mean for this communist island country? These were a series of questions I set out to explore not only this past summer, but this fall semester abroad.

                However, the news came 2 and a half weeks before my departure that the Cuban government shut down our program. I was stunned and confused and lost and had no idea what to do next. Those commie bastards! Well, what I really did next was get my wisdom teeth removed—it was a good week… hah. I was waiting for something, anything and finally I made the decision to do another SIT program in Peru titled: Indigenous Peoples and Globalization. I looked at this program before with interest; indigenous peoples and globalization are two social components that fascinate me and go akin to my previous research on Cuba in terms of agency, authenticity, the exotic, the ‘other’, etc etc.

                I found myself buying winter clothes for the city of Cusco and completely reorganizing my mental state and erasing expectations: giving myself a tabula rasa. I fly from Houston to Lima in a surreal haze of confusion and excitement. I spent the night in a hotel and got ready to fly to 12,000 feet above sea level that is Cusco, the ancient great city of the Incas.

                I arrive and see my crew waiting for me and other students and quickly hopped on the bus and gulped down some coca tea waiting to alleviate the awkwardness that always accompanies new groups of people. We travel 2 hours to Urubamba where we would all stay for 5 days getting to know each other and the program and basically making friends and getting adjusted (and to see who was going to go crazy from altitude sickness).

                During this time we visited the ruins of Machu Picchu, a fascinating and humbling place that will always be a place of controversy, mystery, and beauty. Maybe I’ll do a post about the weirdness of Machu Picchu—but really I want to finish this one, it’s about 2 months old. Check my flickr for pictures of Machu Picchu! 

                When we got back to Cusco, my host family was out of town so I spent a few days in another family’s house. My host mom arrived and took me to my new crib which is a beautiful 3 bedroom apartment in the neighborhood of Magisterio.

                I will fill in later more about my school work, classes, other visits we have done and weird things I have learned and appreciated about Peru.

Until then, listo pues

John but here I am known as Juan -__-

LLEGUE AL PERU

Hey guys- yeah this site is a little wrong because I am currently in Cusco, Peru, having my original plan of going back to Cuba cancelled by the Cuban government... ¡Viva Fidel! Hahaha... Ass holes. Pardon my Spanish. So right now I am at an internet cafe.. it´s kind of like someone´s apartment that they turned a room of into the cafe. Super cheap to use the internet, like around 30 cents an hour versus the fffffuerte $6/hour Cuban internet...that´s definitely not as good. My host family is currently in a different city (Lima) because of an emergency, so I have yet to meet them. They should be back soon. Right noooow, I am living with another student in his house with that family and they are super cool. The host-mom is the family coordinator so she is a PRO. We didn't get to Cusco until last Thursday actually, but I've been been in Peru since last Saturday. We had an orientation week in Urubamba a little city like 2 hours outside of Cusco where we got to know each other, danced some salsa, hung out, braided each others hair and sang kumbaya, but not really. Just the first half. I´m trying to figure out a good internet strategy, so I am trying to upload pictures and take some more. There has been little free time except for this weekend when we hung out and partied woo! Friday we went to a swanky bar that one of the other student´s host brother owns. It was super swanky with a live band with a lead singer lady who sang some classic rock songs. I think my favorite was 'I Feel like a Woman' which isn't a classic ROCK song, but definitely a CLASSIC. Saturday we went to Club Groove that a group of indigenous-identifying students recommended to us. It's in the center of the city and lemmetellya Centro Cusco is sweet, dudes. I've only been there twice but it is full of tourism (super touristy) and bars, clubs, restaurants, shops, pretty stone work and buildings. But yeah Saturday at Groove was crazy and then after that we went to Mama Africa (haha) and that was fun also. A lot of dancing and singing songs from the US. My favorites of the night: Groove played some Grease songs, like the musical and Mama Africa played party in the USA, like miley cyrus. Today we started Spanish classes and I am in a literature class because I am soOooOoo good at spanish (lol, help) but it's about Andean Culture which is what this whole program is mostly about because we are in Cusco, super high up, like 12000ft. NO ALTITUDE SICKNESS, but sometimes breathing and stairs are a lot of work...... but I think that´s just an accurate reflection on my current shape. Okay this is just an update and I will let YINZ GUYS know more when I figure out WHAT IM DOING. I already have over 200 pages of reading due by Thursday, so this IS NOT A VACATION... but it is on the weekendssss HEYyyy! But seriously all in Spanish the readings are (yoda) so, hasta la proxima y que sea prontoo0o0o0. John, the crazy blog-master