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First Impressions of Oxapampa, my site

So I joined Peace Corps as a Water And Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) engineer, and after working on water projects in El Salvador and Cameroon with Engineers Without Borders for 7 years, I had prepared myself to live in a small village without running water.

When I got my site assignment and came to my new home fore the first time, I was pleasantly disappointed to find myself living in a nice room with running water. (Well, usually there is running water. Without warning, we lose water for a few hours about 5-10 times a month). The showers are cold so I often take the health advice that it is not great to shower every single day. (Thank you Jessica for this entertaining article!)

My site is Oxapampa (town), Oxapampa (district), Oxapampa (province), Pasco (Department), Peru. Or Oxapampa for short.

The entire province is a UNESCO biosphere reserve, and the town of Oxapampa is a beautiful little tourist town as well as the provincial capital, and it takes a lot of pride in being a part of a UNESCO biosphere reserve, having clean air, and being “tranquillo” – safe and calm. The schools put a lot of emphasis on environmental stewardship, and most people have a pretty strong sense of wanting to do what’s best for the environment.

In some ways it has the feel of a small or medium-sized rural town in Texas (or in any state, but I’m more familiar with Texas), though the motorcycles and mototaxis outnumber the cars (and it’s a lot more green and jungly).

They have rodeo here a few times a year, where cowboys from here and from other towns come to compete. They play country music at the rodeos and at some local events, and they host Country Fest once a year, which includes performers from all over the world (mostly South America) singing various country songs, including many popular country songs from the US.

There are chickens and/or cows in some yards (I walk past a cow and sheep on my way to work every day,and when I hear rustling in the grass, it’s not a squirrel, nor a bird – it’s a chicken). I know this sounds weird, but the sound of roosters regularly every day is kind of comforting for me.

Most everyone knows everyone, or at least someone from the family (though the town has grown drastically in the last 10 years and that is changing.) It is very common to see women in skinny jeans and a plaid long-sleeve (which I think might be a general fashion trend?), but it definitely reminds me of the rural US.

The majority of people have farms and raise some type of animal (chickens, cows, and/or pigs usually) and/or grow some type of crops – zapallo (a large pumpkin-squash thing) and granadilla are the most popular. You can find many artisanal products made here such as honey, coffee, cheese, and yogurt.

People’s farms are usually outside the town, so the houses in town are relatively close together and the town is very walkable (which I love!) – it is about 30 blocks by 15 blocks, and there are moto-taxis for public transportation.

Just about everyone rides a motorcycle to go everywhere. Except me. Peace Corps does not allow us to ride motorcycles.

Lucky for me, I love walking and riding my bike, and I always have. Anyway, it’s actually pretty great because I have a little more time to appreciate the INCREDIBLE landscapes that surround me every day.

From Oxapampa town, there are beautiful tree-covered mountains in all 360-degrees of your vista. They call them hills, and it’s true, they are probably the forested foothills of the Andes, but they are so grand the best way to describe them is mountains. (Yes, I said grand.)

Like all the districts in Peru (and maybe all of Latin America that has Spanish influence? Help me out history people…), the city center has a small park called a plaza de armas, with the municipality and a catholic church.

In the case of Oxapampa, it has the oldest wooden church in Peru, and built of wood from a tree called diablo, or “the devil”, so they say it is the only church where god and the devil live together.

Most of these photos are around the plaza, so things look pretty ordered and the streets are paved. Currently the town has quite a few paved streets, but the majority are still dirt roads, and the dust blows around in the wind during the dry season.

Speaking of the weather…I LOVE it. One day I swear I experienced 3 seasons (as they are defined in Washington, DC weather) in one day…the morning was cool like an autumn morning, then it rained (could have been a spring or autumn rain), then the sun came out in the afternoon and it was HOT like a summer day, and then the evening was like a cool spring evening. I would say that day accurately describes the weather here…a little bit of everything, sometimes all in one day, but never too hot and never too cold.

Usually the days are 70-80°F, but even when the air doesn’t feel very hot, the sun burns – thanks to being close to the equator, and thanks to the altitude of 1,800 meters (5,900 feet). And maybe it has something to do with the hole in the ozone layer which I think is nearby, a little more south of here…(but is getting smaller thanks to global efforts to curb ozone-depleting substances!!! But I digress.)

For you science or weather geeks:

Since I’m in the southern hemisphere, it’s winter here when it’s summer in the US and vice versa, right? Well, yes but no. Since I live in the selva alta (high jungle), and we’re close to the equator, the climate is more tropical, so instead of winter and summer we have rainy season and dry season. Rainy season is about October-March and they call it winter because we don’t see the sun much and so the air generally stays cool…so our “winter” actually corresponds to winter in the States. The rest of the time is called summer because the sun is usually out and so there are more days that feel hot…however, the nights get cooler than they do during the rainy season, sometimes almost reaching freezing. So this winter/summer business is a little confusing. I just always carry sunscreen, sunglasses, a jacket, and an umbrella, and life is good.

Being a Tourist in your Own City

Sometimes you can live for years, or decades, in one place, going about daily life, knowing your part of the city, but often not really spending much time doing the “touristy things” in your city. And then someone comes to visit and suddenly you have to be the tour guide and different aspects of your city come alive for you for the first time, or again after many years?

I’m still new to my town of Oxapampa – I have been here 9 months now – so I am still getting to know some of the gems that are here. I have been getting to know my family, making friends, and trying to “integrate” (and improve my Spanish so I can actually understand what’s going on around me and connect with people). I’ve been getting to know my way around the city and the surrounding areas (sometimes on bicycle with friends). And I spend a lot of time thinking about, planning, and navigating my work here…the daily grind so to speak.

I have learned that Oxapampa is a rural tourist town where Limeños (people who live in the capital city of Lima) like to vacation. It is known for its tranquility, landscapes, fresh and natural agricultural products, and interesting history of native inhabitants that have centuries of history here and the Austro-German colonists that settled here in the 17^th century. It is also a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. But in the midst of all the newness and trying to be part of the community, trying to make Oxapampa my home, I have not really stopped to think of Oxapampa from the tourist perspective – what gems would a tourist want to see if they only had 1-2 days here? Naturally, everyone expects me to know the answer since I live here, but you really have to step out of your daily life to think of your city from a different perspective to be able to answer that question.

Luckily, last weekend I finally had the opportunity to do that. I was invited to participate in the inauguration of a new tourist route called “Oxapampa, authenitc and natural”. With about 30 people – from the regional government, a local NGO, local coffee producer, and a local tourist agency – we got to participate (for free!) in the inaugural tour of the nearby native community Tsachopen (“Satchopén”), a dairy farm, and a co-op that produces fair trade and organic certified coffee.

Our first stop was one of the dairy farms in the region that produces cheese and yogurt. They have about 100 cows and they don’t give the cows supplements to make them produce milk year-round; they produce when they are pregnant, so they rotate production. In this way, they explained, the cows continue producing milk their whole life, whereas cows that are made to produce constantly stop producing after a few years. The cows were well-trained…without any direction from a person, they all filed into their stalls waiting to be connected to the machine that pumps their milk.

The baby calves don’t drink milk directly from the mothers, they get the milk that doesn’t go into the products (including the milk from cows that have recently been given any kind of medicine, or anything they don’t want going into the products.)

And we got to sample the 7-8 different kinds of cheese they make and the yogurt.

Our next stop was the coffee co-op, made up of producers from around the region, including native and colonial descent, men and women. They pride themselves on representing the various cultures of the region and making sure that women have leadership roles in the co-op. This woman explained the process of the plant we visited – the producers bring their product to be processed at the plant – weighed, de-pulped, washed, and dried. The product they produce is certified organic and fair trade and exported to the US and Europe.

Our guide from the coffee co-op explains that this is where they dry the coffee

Our last stop was Tsachopen, the native Yanesha community 15 minutes from the town of Oxapampa. Here we had the privilege of seeing a few dances with native costumes, drums and chanting, a lunch of smoked chicken with yucca and sweet potato, and the opportunity to purchase artisanal products (jewelry, bags, hats, etc.) and locally harvested vegetables and fruit.

A dance performance in the Yanesha community of Tsachopen

This tour is not the only tourist thing to do in Oxapampa, but it was a great way to get put myself in the tourist shoes and get to know my town and appreciate it on a deeper level. I definitely recommend taking some time every now and then to be a tourist in your own city! (And come visit me in mine if you can 😉

*For those who read Spanish (or want to practice), there was an article in the Peruvian news about the event.

**Finally, I want to apologize for the poor quality of photos…I think I dropped my phone too many times!

El Niño

I should have known it was an omen predicting the fate of my entire journey, when the taxi broke down about one block from the bus station. On the bright side…we were just one block from the bus station…so I could haul all my luggage to the bus station on foot…inconvenient, but doable.

At the bus station, I checked my luggage and boarded the bus, trying to mentally prepare myself for the 19-hour bus ride from Lima to Bagua, Amazonas for a week-long training in Bagua and Chachapoyas (and afterwards, a short vacation to see the amazing Kuelap ruins (“the Machu Picchu of the north”), Gocta waterfall (one of the tallest in the world), thermal baths of Rodriguez de Mendoza, and other wonders of the beautiful region of Amazonas).

About one hour into the ride, on the outskirts of the greater metropolitan area of Lima, I was gazing out the window and saw our bus changing lanes, despite the fact that there was another large truck already in that lane. There was a barely noticeable crunching noise, and soon the bus pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. Turns out we had broken a mirror and would have to wait to replace it before we could move on. They played a movie to entertain us, but after the movie was over we still hadn’t moved. I went outside and started chatting with the bus driver, and it turns out they were waiting for someone to bring a replacement mirror from Lima (and Friday evening traffic in Lima is no joke). Three hours later the mirror arrived, and after about 4.5 hours of waiting, we were back on the road again.

So, after leaving Friday night at 4pm, I had hoped to be in Bagua by Saturday morning at 10am, but now I was looking at arriving Saturday afternoon. A little frustrating, but I would still have time to get a day’s rest before the 6-day, intensive training that started Monday.

I got a decent night’s sleep on the bus that night and the journey was going pretty well until we came to a complete stop at about noon the next day (Saturday). There was a line of traffic and it wasn’t moving. Long story short, at 7pm it was getting dark and traffic still hadn’t moved. We got word that there was a landslide blocking the road ahead – about 6 miles ahead – and the tractors clearing the road had stopped for the night and would not resume until the morning.

We were going to be spending another night on the bus, and this time with the bus stopped and without air conditioning. Luckily, there were some restaurants nearby so the passengers went to go eat and then we sat outside the bus chatting. I started stretching and jokingly said I could lead a class of yoga on the side of the highway, but a couple of women and kids were legitimately interested so we proceeded to stretch and do exercises in between the stopped buses.

I did not sleep much that night and instead walked to see the situation with the landslide. It was in fact about an hour and a half walk ahead, and while there were not large rocks (pieces of mountains) blocking the road like I had seen in my previous travel delay due to landslides, the road was covered in a thick layer of mud which swallowed my shoes and left them a new color brown for the rest of my journey.

The next morning, it took the tractors a few hours after the sun rose before they started working, and the road wasn’t clear until about 10am. However, because the line of stopped traffic was so long and there was only one lane cleared where the landslide was, we didn’t actually pass the landslide and emerge into smoothly flowing traffic until about 4pm. That would be 4pm Sunday (I had completely lost track of the days). So finally, I was hoping to arrive in Bagua at about 7pm Sunday, 30 hours after my predicted arrival time.

But, no, it wasn’t that easy. About an hour later, we were stopped again, waiting for tractors to clear yet another landslide. This time, we could see the landslide, and they were close to finished clearing it, so it was only about another 2-hour delay. When we finally passed this landslide, our driver wanted to stop and eat, despite the fact that the entire bus (except 1 woman) was begging to continue so we could just finally reach our destination.

Finally, at 10pm Sunday night I arrived in Bagua…54 hours after leaving Lima. Extremely inconvenient…but I survived it (and thanks to the camaraderie with my fellow passengers it wasn’t so terrible). However, I did “need a marker”, which is a joke here meaning that you have sat for so long your butt is flat and the crack has disappeared so you need a marker to redraw it. A little crude but hilarious.

Throughout the rest of the week while I was in training, the conditions worsened on the roads and also in cities along the northern coast of Peru. Due to the flooding caused by the El Niño phenomenon, tens of thousands of people lost their homes in floods, hundreds were injured, and almost 100 are reported dead. Some photos here.

After training ended, I was evacuated by plane since the roads were inaccessible. Nope, I didn’t get to see the amazing sites of Amazonas, nor see my friends from the US who were visiting Peru, but were fortunately safely enjoying themselves in southern Peru…but I am alive and well.

I understand the Peruvian government is mobilizing to help the victims, sending aid to local governments and raising money through text message campaigns and telethons. Right now, with roads blocked and flooded, it is pretty tough to even get supplies to many affected areas, so the local governments and neighbors are helping the most. There is a national campaign “Peru: una sola fuerza”, and internally, people are helping each other (though there are of course the stories of the looters and those who take advantage too).

The recently elected president has said some intelligent things (like that when rebuilding they need to model their northern neighbor Ecuador who was also hit by El Niño but did not suffer so much because of better infrastructure. (Of course there is also finger-pointing that the previous president misused funds that were supposed to be used for infrastructure projects to prepare for El Niño.)

They predict El Niño will start to weaken at the end of April, so there is not much rebuilding they can do now; mostly locally they have to take care of the victims in the short term. I still haven’t heard of any organizations (other than national and local governments) that are providing aid, but I will keep searching and let you know if I find a way that you can help.