Huaraz, te quiero x100pre!

x100pre, my students taught me, means para siempre.

School




I ask, how many teachers do you know whose students ask them if they can come to class half an hour early to start working?  Well, now you know at least one ;-)  Our students kiss us every day when they arrive and when they leave.  They wrote their first poems today.  I messed up the link to our website.. it should be http://escribachica.tumblr.com/.  Angie will be updating it today with some of the girls' new work.  

The girls are funny and sometimes write about things I wouldn't write about.  One thirteen-year-old wrote a love poem: "te quitaron tu piel de mi piel" -- they took your skin off my skin.  Angie and I later discovered that was a line from a pop song.




Churup, "Difficult +", 5493m (18,022 ft)

If I could have a super power, it would be to attract mountain guides.  I met some Romanian boys in the plaza, one a mountain guide, and they invited me to climb Churup (5493m, 18,022ft) with them.  I said yes, and committed to what would've been one of the most thrilling experiences of my life, if it wasn't for the fact that coca leaves kept me calm in the face of steep ice faces.  My confidence is building with every step, but as I climb harder mountains, so grows my awareness that there is not always an easy way out.  Before we started climbing, Mihnea said to me "I'm counting on you to do this, because I don't know if we can bail."  Ultimately, we didn't summit -- the snow was too loose in some parts and we would've pulled down big rocks.  We were able to rappel down.  

I became familiar with the term "dry-tooling" just before doing it for the first time.  Dry-tooling is when you use your ice axes to climb rocks -- you hook it on to a small crimp and pull.  Churup is a mixed climb, meaning you are climbing both vertical ice and rock.  It is one of the more technical mountains in the Cordillera Blanca, rated "D+" (difficult plus) on the mountaineering scale. I am told that now that I've climbed on Churup, Alpamayo would be a walk in the park, and so would be almost anything else here. The route goes straight up from the base to the peak through the couloir (see the line in the picture).

Curious about the mountaineering scale? Here's the run-down:

F: facile (easy). Straightforward, possibly a glacial approach, snow and ice will often be at an easy angle.

• PD: peu difficile (not very difficult). Routes may be longer at altitude, with snow and ice slopes up to 45 degrees. Glaciers are more complex, scrambling is harder, descent may involve rappelling. More objective hazards.
• AD: assez difficile (fairly difficult). Fairly hard, snow and ice at an angle of 45-65 degrees, rock climbing up to UIAA grade III, but not sustained, belayed climbing in addition to a large amount of exposed but easier terrain. Significant objective hazard.
• D: difficile (difficult). Hard, more serious with rock climbing at IV and V, snow and ice slopes at 50-70 degrees. Routes may be long and sustained or harder but shorter. Serious objective hazards.
• TD: très difficile (very difficult). Very hard, routes at this grades are serious undertakings with high level of objective danger. Sustained snow and ice at an angle of 65-80 degrees, rock climbing at grade V and VI with possible aid, very long sections of hard climbing.
• ED1/2/3/4: extrêmement difficile (extremely difficult). Extremely hard, exceptional objective danger, vertical ice slopes and rock climbing up to VI to VIII, with possible aid pitches.
• ABO: Abominablement difficile (abominable) Extremely difficult as well as being dangerous - self explanatory.

Mihnea and Claudiu gave me a small Romanian flag – they say that so few Romanians have been in the Cordillera Blanca that almost any mountain I climb would be a first Romanian summit. Churup would have been.

I also learned Romanian climbing terms – instead of “off-belay,” “belay-on” etc. They just make a loud “Piu” sound. Once for off-belay, twice for on-belay, and three times for “something's gone wrong.” At popular crags, it sounds like a bird's nest.

Tid-bits:


I like to eat at a vegetarian diner in the market, where you get a huge meal for a dollar and a half.  Lupe, the 5 year old waitress, mixes up Spanish and Quechua and says some funny things "Yo me baño calatita. ¿Tu como te bañas?" -- I bathe naked, how do you bathe?

Mujeres en la Guerra

It didn't take long in Latin America to remember why I devoted my master's degree to studying land rights and agrarian reform.  My Colombian friend Leyla, who shares many interests in common with me but is older and more experienced, spent the past few hours in my room telling me about the communities she worked in in the rural Colombian rainforest -- forced to grow coca to sell to narcotraficantes, then affected by the guerrillas, then the paramilitares, then the ejercito, and now still in quasi-slave labor for the drug trade.  For her male students who see no future as coca producers or in ranching, the face of opportunity is to join either the guerrillas or the ejercito.  Her best female student, who she offered to take to Bogota to live in her house and go to college, was not allowed to leave her family because then there would be no one to clean the house.  To the surprise of no cliche, she is now a prostitute.  In rural Colombia, abuse of women and sexual abuse of children is all too normal.  I have read that Ancash province of Peru--the province I am in right now--has the highest abuse rates in the country among rural people.  The girls Angie and I are working with come from the rural outskirts of Huaraz -- some travel an hour to come to school, and these are just the ones who can make it.  I don't know much about their home lives.

Leyla also recommended the book Mujeres en la Guerra about women involved in the violent conflict of Colombia.

In lighter news, I made my first big Spanish faux-pas today!  In class, we gave the girls personal journals and had them personalize the covers with words that describe themselves.  Helping them come up with words, I suggested feliz, bonita, inteligente, creativa, abierta-- happy, pretty, smart, creative, open.  Abierta, open.  When I said "abierta" one of the older girls looked up and asked "Abierta?" and told me "You don't say that here, it has a double meaning."  Which I guess to mean "loose/easy."  Whoops.

Angie has created a blog/website specifically for our project, in which we'll be publishing some of the writings of our girls, and reflecting on the process of the project.  Interested?  Check out:  http://www.escribachica.tumblr.com

One Year Later....Back in Huaraz

Marcel Proust says that the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. My third time back in Huaraz, I'm wearing contact lenses.

Thanks to an idea hatched by my friend Angie (who I met on a trail in Patagonia last year) and one last grant from Stanford, I am no longer just here to climb mountains. Angie and I are teaching creative writing workshops for teenage girls in two schools. In our first school, an NGO sponsors free meals for children that come down from the hills and cannot afford food. The girls we work with are from that group. At home, half of them speak Quechua. The other is a private school where a teacher hosts after-school programming for underprivileged kids. We'll be working with that group as well. School starts today.

It took us all of yesterday to plan our first hour of class and purchase materials. Hat down to all school teachers.

I'm settling in fine to Huaraz. On the bus from Lima, I got offered a free place to live for three months, equipped with my own bathroom, a panoramic view of the sunset over the mountains, a half-pitbull that sometimes poops in front of my door, and an internet connection. The house is on the city's busiest street corner and I have made close friends with my earplugs. All this in exchange for English conversation practice over breakfast.

I almost took a job as a barrista two nights a week in one of my favorite cafe/bars 13 Buhos (13 Owls), but my fear of set schedules intervened. Angie did take it.

And I spent my birthday at Hatun Machay, my favorite sport climbing destination in the world. Angie brought a cake, and we made quick friends with all the eccentric Argentines. My mom got me a book on mountaineering, which turns out to be the mountaineering bible. I'm waiting for luck to introduce me to a few capable mountaineers willing to drag me up mountains with them. Until then, I'll be playing guide to take us up some easier mountains. If the weather holds (which it might not, because of climate change), we plan to go up Vallunaraju this weekend.