The Colca Valley a little bit outside of Yanque. Each row is another field a different product.
The mountains in the distance are the beginning of the Colca Canyon (biggest in the world).
Right now, it is really dry and the fields are all yellow and brown, but they say come the rainy season (January-March) it all becomes green, and even more impressive.
My sister, Amy, being very touristy in the plaza of my town.
The students dance a traditional dance every morning in the plaza from 6-7 for the tourists to watch (or dance in Amy's case) and they take donations for school materials and school trips. They artisans also sell their products in the plaza to these same tourists. She visited my site in July, before I even knew I was moving here. Weird.
Most families own chacra (farmland) where they work most days, so Yanque is pretty dead during the day when they are all out in the chacra. For that reason, I have been trying to get out to the chacra as often as I can. I also want to learn as much as I can about it since that is basically how my community survives. By the way, growing up in Texas, you would probably assume I would have raised some cattle in my day, or maybe worked on the ranch or something. But I had to move all the way to Peru to finally get into it...and I get a kick out of it. I already cleaned the canals for irrigation to come this season, grazed the cows, learned to sling stones to protect the cows (like david and goliath), and drank chicha for lunch (fermented corn- I'm going to need an entire post to describe the chicha experience here). I had ridden horses before, but never anything as real as this.
My host dad, Don Gerardo, is a local farmer, who I'm pretty sure is the most popular guy in town. He is between 70 and 74, wears a cowboy hat everyday, and knows everyone in town (He also might be a grandfather/uncle/father/or godfather to 1/4 of the town). Since everyone knows him, everyone knows who I am...his gringo.
Don Gerardo (left) and his son (right) wearing their normal clothes and cowboy hats. Makes me feel like I'm still back in Texas. Pretty soon I'll be the third guy on the right with my cowboy hat and jeans.
Yanque actually feels like a small town in Texas, and the landscape reminds me of it as well. It is like Albany, Texas, just made up of stucco homes with thatch roofs, and with everyone speaking Spanish and the native language of Quechua instead of English. Also most people here raise an eat alpaca instead of beef (more economical-cows are for milk). My family for example raises alpaca in the highlands and slaughter about 3 per year. They eat some fresh, and then turn the rest into jerky and that's what they eat all year. They also live off of their farmland. My host family grows; choclo (dried overgrown corn) , habas (lima beans on steroids), wheat, barley, alfalfa, potatoes, quinoa, and some other stuff, and they store this, and eat it all year long.
Llama being herded (pronounced yama as my mom would say). These are a cousin of the alpaca I eat. They look similar, llama are just bigger.
That's all I have for my town, but I have way more pictures to post
