Sister Update

I got an email from my sister in Peru, and I'm taking the liberty of posting some of it:

Hello everyone,
Okay, here I am in A-- and it is awesome. Soooooo different from Lima. I´m staying in a hostel-like place but the only people staying there are people involved in the project. Luckily there is this little internet place around the corner but it takes forever to load each little page.

So there is one main street through the town (though I don´t know what criteria is necessary to identify something as a town). All the roads are made of dirt, most of the houses have cement or dirt floors. Each morning I get up around 7 (my roomie wakes me up with her alarm because she has to get all cute before anyone sees her and has a whole freakin cosmetic counter in our room...hmmm. But she´s cool. Most of the people are, but even if they weren´t, I am so down for this kind of work.)

Okay, so we get up early, and this lady, Rosa, comes over and makes breakfast--runny porridge, rolls (mostly the crust, the interior part of the roll is usually close to empty) maybe hard boiled eggs, powdered coffee with canned milk, and fruit. I have actually eaten vegetables and fruit and so far, knock on wood, I've been alright. For dinner it’s a lot of carbs: potatoes, rice, french fries; chickpeas, tomatoes, this kick ass hot sauce called Ahi (I'll bring some back). I have also eaten cuy, that guinea pig-rabbit type animal commonly eaten here, as well as cow heart on a stick (think fair food) at a fiesta. The other night I had lamb, too. In both Lima and here, I got lots of fresh fish, and cebiche is supposed to be the dish the city is famous for.

So more about my days here: After breakfast, we gather our buckets and trowels and things and climb on the back of a truck and ride about 45 minutes out into the desert where there are all sorts of archaeological surprises. I can´t believe it. A lot of the burials have been looted so there are human body parts sticking out of the sand like a fake set for a movie or something. It´s unbelievable and so damn exhilarating. The other day in my unit, we found a human skull but we can't take it out and that part is so hard. We have to dig all around it and document each thing we find and then the last thing we do is take it out. It´s so freakin awesome. I am burnt and dirty and tired at the end of each day, but luckily we have showers (cold) and a bar right down the street. I have a good time just talking to people and practicing Spanish. No one on the team except for two people speak any Spanish. Sometimes I am even able to translate for them which of course makes me feel cool.

I am more interested in going out and talking with local people but I feel like it’s a weird episode of survivor. My unit has a sort of alliance because we came in the second part of the project and that kind of separates us from the others. But then there are times when I want to go out on my own, but since they are part of my unit I have to be careful not to let them feel rejected. Then since I always talk to the Peruvian members of the team, I am perceived as more different than my already different group. It’s very complicated and kind of annoying but also interesting. Might be funny to write an anthropological paper on archaeologists trying to come together as a team.

I guess I am kind of put out by some of the attitudes toward the Peruvians. For example, there are 4 or 5 guys who were hired to help unload buckets of sand as we dig. It is not uncommon for people to just say " Marco! Bucket!" and point at their full bucket. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it just seems like the group doesn’t appreciate them as members of the team, only people who speak a different language who have to help us. When I first came out to the site, we stopped for a little snack and the white people were all in one group and the Peruanos were in their own group. I asked this girl how come we don’t all sit together and she said "because they speak Spanish and that’s just the way it is." Other people also refer to them as the "Spanish guys." What?????

Okay, that’s enough from me about this. There are some great people on the team too, but I wouldn’t mind if I worked with a completely different team next year.

But for real, this town is amazing and tiny and friendly and different from anywhere I have ever been. There are skinny black and white cows, cotton fields, barren desert mountains, people walking their donkeys or herding their goats and sheep. There is this one little girl who herds sheep in an area we pass on the way to the site. She wears bright colors and a big hat and she is all by herself wandering with her sheep through the outskirts of town.

Can't you just picture it all? I'm looking forward to the next installment!