Kusi

From One House to Another

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The past few days have been filled with traveling, long bus trips, moving suitcases and little sleep, but I love it all. To see people I haven’t seen in months, despite being down here in the same country, has been so nice and definitely made the departure from Puerto Alegria a lot easier. I was able to spend 2 quick days at the Girasoles home in Kusi, which until Puerto Alegria, was one of my favorite sites and I have great relationships with the house parents, family and boys. It was great to see some familiar faces and the cold air! (It was so cold to me that I had to wear long pants and usually three layers. The weather wasn’t any different than normal, but after acclimating myself to a hot, humid jungle, the cool crisp air was freezing. Some of the boys asked me why I was wearing so many layers since they are used to seeing Americans in t-shirts and I said ¡estoy casi congelada, hasta mis huesos! I’m almost frozen, down to my bones… Unfortunately, because of the drastic climate change and dust in Kusi, I have lost my voice, have a horribly sore throat and headache.).

After the quick trip to Kusi with Billy and his family, we returned to Lima on the night bus and as soon as we arrived in Lima, I took off in a taxi to another bus station where I would take a bus to Ica – 4 hours south of Lima. The entire trip, all 4 hours, was only $9. Unfortunately the bus stops frequently to pick up and drop off passengers, so the trip took more like 5 hours.

Once arriving in Ica, I met the Girasoles house father, Augusto and went to the Girasoles home to see the boys before they headed off to school for the afternoon.

The plan is to stay here in Ica tonight and then tomorrow afternoon catch another bus back to Lima, where I will go defrente al aeropuerto (directly to the airport) to catch my flight back home.

Goodbye Amazon, Hello Andes

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This morning was my last little bit to spend time with the boys at Puerto Alegria. Out of anticipation of leaving and wanting to take advantage of the little time I had before departing the house at 8:30, I woke up at 5:45 to shower and pack the few things I still needed, like my tent. If everything had worked perfectly, 5:45 would have been a perfect time to wake up. On my way to the shower, I ran into Lilia, one of the cooks, who informed me that there was no water – somebody forgot to fill the tank with water from the river the night before – and I would have to wait for him to get up and do it. So, I returned to my room and finished packing.

At about 7:30, the boys were all up (I also forgot that they sleep in on Sundays and don´t wake up at the normal 6am!) and ready for breakfast. Since it is Sunday, they didn´t have their typical morning devotional since they were to meet later on in the day and we proceeded to have breakfast – my favorite Puerto ALegria breakfast, pancakes! But before we ate, Willy, the caregiver spoke to the boys about the team from Nebraska that left the day before, about how they had come from such a long way away to share God’s love with them. Atfer mentioning the team, he changed topics and started talking about how thankful the boys should be for me – for the 2 months I spent playing, dancing, hugging, singing, and supporting them in their lives. (Me?! I was only doing what I thought I should be doing.) This made me realize that these were my last moments with them and, of course, made me cry. Things did not get better when they started to sing one of my favorite songs, La Niña de Tus Ojos, a song I woke up and fell asleep to every night while in Puerto Alegria.

When it was time to go, I carried my bags down to the maloca (the gazebo by the river) where all 43 boys were waiting for me. The littlest, Luis (who I have written about before), ran up to me and asked where I was going. I explained that I had to go to my home, that I loved him very much, and that I would miss him. He said that it was okay because he was going to come with me. After telling me this, he ran over to his Papi Willy and told him that he was going to go with me, wherever I was going. After loading my bags into the chalupa (boat), I returned up to the maloca for the final goodbyes. They charged me and one by one, I said goodbye to each boy. Some came multiple times and the whole time I was hugging them, Luis was standing at my feet with his arms around my knees and his head buried in my legs. Of course by this time I was crying and he asked me over and over again, “Why are you crying? Why are you sad?”

At some point it was time to go, time to make the last trip into Iquitos, time to leave Puerto Alegria for the last time on this trip.

(As I write this, I´m sitting in Billy’s apartment in Lima, waiting for our 11pm bus to head up to Huaraz, where we´ll take a little van to Yungay and a taxi up to our Girasoles home in Kusi. Today I will have traveled by boat, plane, bus and car to go from the Amazon jungle to the Andean highlands – all in 24 hours.)

36 hours: 5 buses, 2 boats, 1 airplane and very little sleep

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In the past 36 hours, I used almost every form of transportation possible in Peru. Short of riding a train, I traveled down from the Casa Girasoles Kusi home nearby Yungay/Huaraz, to Lima and then up to Iquitos to the Casa Girasoles Puerto Alegria home – all in 36 hours.

The long day started Saturday morning in Kusi. My Scottish team, which was a school group from Kyle Academy in Ayr, Scotland, spent Saturday morning making hundreds of adobe bricks and preparing to depart Kusi later that day. Midday, they broke from working to participate in the traditional Pachamanca meal that ends each week with work teams. Pachamanca is a delicious meal that is cooked in the ground. The fire starts at 4am the morning of the meal and food prepared and wrapped in banana leaves are dropped into the pit to cook on the hot coals for 1 hour. The pachamanca is traditionally followed by the Peruvian vs. American/Scottish soccer game, where Peru always wins.

Around 5pm, we boarded two combis (which are Peruvian minivan taxis) to head down to Yungay, to meet our bus fletado (private bus, like a Greyhound), which would drive through the night and take us directly to the Lima airport for us to meet our 4am flight to Iquitos. Typically the trip between Yungay and Lima takes 8 or 9 hours, depending on how many stops you make and how fast the driver takes on the winding mountainous roads.

Miraculously, it only took 7 hours for us to descend from the Andes into Callao and the Lima airport. This meant we arrived at the airport at a prompt midnight, four hours before our flight was supposed to depart! Thankfully there was no line at the LAN counters and we were able to check our belongings without much hassle. By 12:30 we headed upstairs to the restaurants and stores. All that was left to do was wait for our 4:35am flight.

We proceeded downstairs to the domestic departure waiting room, where we were told that there was bad weather (which means extreme rain) in Iquitos and the flight would be delayed 1 hour. After 20 minutes, the flight was delayed yet again for another hour. Surprisingly the team of students was unusually upbeat and having a grand time talking back and forth, watching One Tree Hill (apparently it’s quite popular among some of them), and playing mind/card tricks with their teachers.

We finally made it out of Lima around 6:30 in the morning, two hours after our original flying time. You would think that after this ordeal we would have easy travels the rest of the way to Puerto Alegria.

Not quite.

Once we arrived in Iquitos, we met an English couple that would accompany us during the day in Iquitos and few days at the Casa Girasoles home in Puerto Alegria. Our first stop in Iquitos was to drive 1.5 hours to the port of Nauta, where we would meet up with a Scottish medical work team that was heading out on the Amazon Hope 2 for ten days. One of SU’s six ministries is a medical mission, which takes place primarily at a clinic in Belen (the slum neighborhood of Iquitos), and on two boats the organization owns, the Amazon Hope 1 and Amazon Hope 2.

Before we even reached Nauta, the bus that we were traveling on managed to overheat – from a mixture of the long distance, extreme heat in Iquitos, many hills we climbed, and old machinery – causing us to switch buses and join the medical team that was traveling ahead of us. Finally, we made it to Nauta.

The boat, which has capacity for the 10 medical volunteers, a staff of Peruvian doctors, and ship crew, departed Nauta and took us on a 45-minute journey down the river. The scenery was beautiful, and seemed very exciting to travel down one of the Amazon tributaries for ten days.

After Nauta, we returned to Iquitos (in a bus that didn’t overheat) to have lunch at the traditional Ari’s Burgers – one of the only gringo (a name for a white person, non-Peruvian) friendly restaurants in Iquitos. By this time we were all exhausted, hungry, and hot from the hot and humid weather. A cold water and frozen lemonade were desperately needed.

Following Ari’s we re-boarded the bus to take us to the port where we would meet the boat owned by Puerto Alegria. From this port, we made the 45-minute journey down the River Itaya to the Casa Girasoles home in Puerto Alegria.

36 hours with 1 plane, 5 buses, 2 boats and we finally made it.

Push!

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Pushing the Combi, originally uploaded by katherinebruder.

Sometimes Angel’s van needs a little help getting started, so the boys at the Casa Girasoles Kusi give a hand and push the van.

In this case, only the youngest and smallest boys were around to help. Despite their size, they managed to get the van going in no time.

It was quite funny to watch them help out their viejo (old man, but in this case it’s a term of endearment), Angel.