Benjamin's 1st Birthday

Benjamin celebrated his birthday on the 17th May with a party of friends (even though most were age 3+). He had some lovely books (any with animals he growls at!) and various vehicles which he enjoys pushing around (saying 'brum' and 'choo choo'). Although he hasn't quite taken his first steps yet, he is standing and enjoys 'jigging' to music and clapping.

He's generally a very happy chap - even when he wakes at 5am!




Click 'Play' below to see some of his party (it does get brighter after a few seconds!)

Our street

Here are a couple of views down our street and the park opposite that the boys enjoy playing in.






Here is Sammy on his new bike and Benjamin pushing his car.

Cultural Experiences

Parades (‘Desfiles’)

Parades are an important feature of life in Cusco. A few marches we have seen are people demonstrating about something, but on the whole we see a lot of parades marking anniversaries. Every institution has an anniversary or special day and that involves a parade in the main plaza, and sometimes down one of the main roads as well.

Most of the parades are on Sundays, when they close the main plaza to traffic. All the institutions that have an anniversary that week march on the Sunday (apparently otherwise they would have to close the plaza every day for a different march!) Last Sunday we saw a huge parade for the anniversary of Wanchaq, one of the districts of Cusco. There were hundreds of people in traditional costumes and various bands. We have also seen a military parade and parades of various schools.

Thursday was, roughly translated, ‘Day of Initial Education’, when lots of kindergartens marched! There were literally hundreds of three year olds parading round the main plaza with balloons, some in uniform and some in costumes.

The most unusual march I’ve seen though was probably a refuse collectors demonstration when a group of refuse collectors in blue overalls with wheelie bins marched in formation through the main plaza.

Who comes to our door?

The bin men come past ringing a loud bell at 6.25am on Mondays , Wednesdays and Fridays. We have to run out with our rubbish bags.

The security man for our street comes once a month to collect his money.

Jehovah’s Witnesses.

An elderly Quechua lady who collects plastic bottles – I presume she gets money for taking them to a recycling place – she doesn’t speak much Spanish so I don’t understand much of what she says.

A lady with a baby on her back selling fish from a polystyrene box.

A boy selling dictionaries.

The most interesting so far has been a lady with a man in a white coat offering tetanus vaccinations!

A trip to the doctors

As Benjamin is now a year old I decided I had better sort out his vaccinations as he would have been receiving a couple more in Britain around this time. Rachel offered to take me to their doctor, an American man, who works in a clinic serving the poor on the outskirts of Cusco.

It took us about 20 minutes in a taxi to get to the clinic from home. It is situated in a poor area in an attractively situated location. The clinic buildings look fairly new and are built round a grass courtyard. I think a family live on site, as watchmen, which is very common for public buildings here (both the park and church is our road have families living on site). They have maize growing in the ‘garden’ behind the clinic, plus a big cage of chickens.

I have to say that sitting outside on the grass in the sun with a view of the mountains to wait beats sitting in a crowded waiting room full of people with flu, etc! Sammy enjoyed playing with his ball and with the daughters of the doctor who happened to be there that morning.

There seemed to be two nurses and an assistant who took our details and then weighed and measured Sammy and Benjamin. Sammy was really good considering all his trips to the doctors in recent memory have involved jabs! I was a little surprised to realise that Sammy’s last check seems to have been when he was about 18 months, but he’s had no problems and is following his growth line so all is fine. Benjamin has not really been weighed and measured as much as he should have, due to all our moving about in the last 6 months. He continues to be a bit on the small side, particularly with his weight, so the nurse was a little concerned, but I think it’s partly because he is so active. He was only on the fifth percentile with his weight at birth and is on the fifth percentile again now, having been a little higher at 3 and 6 months. The altitude can make children grow a little slower so we need to try and feed him up a bit! The doctor says we can call him on visit if we have any concerns to that is very reassuring. Although our Spanish is OK, it is nice to have an English speaking doctor – come to think of it, I saw very few first-language English doctors in England when I was pregnant!

Mother's Day - Dia de la Madre

Mother's Day is a big thing here. Sammy's school did a special presentation, in which he danced. (See separate entry for a fuller account of Mother's Day in Cusco)


Sammy with his teachers

Click 'play' below to view Sammy's 'jungle warriors' dance

Dia de la Madre - more details

Dia de Madre (Mother’s Day) Mother’s Day is BIG here. In contrast to Easter, when there was no sign of anything in the shops, in the week prior to Mother’s Day almost every shop and café seemed to be decorated with hearts, red balloons and flowers and seemed to be advertising every conceivable gift that you could give to your mother. The schools all do big concerts in the few days before Mother’s Day. I was lucky enough to go to two as Lily (my language teacher) took me to her son’s concert on the Thursday and then we had Sammy’s school presentation on the Saturday. Lily’s son, Filipe, is 5 and goes to, Lily thinks, the best and most expensive school in Cusco. The school is one of these institutions situated behind huge walls so it was interesting to go and see what is inside! The ‘initial’ section is for 3-5 year olds and is housed in new classrooms built on top of the large auditorium. The is also a ‘primaria’ section for 6 –11 year olds and a ‘secondaria’ section for 12-16 year olds, housed in separate blocks. The concert consisted of dances and songs performed by each class in the ‘initial’ section (there were about 9 classes in total). Filipe’s class were dancing to a selection of Abba songs! They were dressed in purple trousers and green shirts which seemed to have been made especially for the occasion. Each class was similarly well-dressed and interspersed with the musical items were poems and readings by both children and adults. Most mums seemed to get the morning off work to come to the concert, and a large number of dads took time off too. I’ve never seen quite so many cameras in one room! We were served with drinks and snacks along the rows and the hall was beautifully decorated with flowers. It was obviously one of the main events of the school year. Sammy’s concert took place on Saturday morning. We went to the building on the edge of town where the older kids are taught as they have more space there than in the pre-school section. They had erected a big gazebo on the grass outside for the parents to sit under and the kids performed in front. He had been asked to wear a white t-shirt and shorts but we didn’t know quite what he was going to be doing. All the classes took part, including the one year olds – you can imagine what that was like – some of them are only just walking so actions for the song were a little beyond them! They looked extremely sweet though! It turned out that Sammy’s little class of 12 were dressed as Indians. They had spent time the week before making little necklaces, feather headdresses, spears and ‘skirts’ and they did quite well marching round and generally doing roughly what they were supposed to do in terms of actions. We were very proud of him! It’s quite a lot to expect three year olds to perform in front of 100+ parents! On Mother’s Day itself we went out to Sacsaywaman (famous ruins above Cusco) for the morning and then had lunch in town (with a large group of people as we had a Latin Link group from Britain visiting). Our church had its Mother’s Day service in the evening. This also turned out to be quite an event with poems, songs by the young people’s group, special prayers and little gifts for the mums, and even a specially invited group of professional singers, in full Spanish costumes! Roland is now waiting to see if Father’s Day is as impressive!

Day of the Cross

Day of the Cross

On Tuesday I went to a ‘Cross Party’. As I arrived at Lily’s house (for my Spanish class) there were a lot of people sitting outside a house nearby with loud music playing. When I asked Lily what was going on she said it was a party for the Day of the Cross (May 2nd). This is the day when anyone who has a cross in their house, or nearby, organises a party with food, drink and dancing. The party starts on the 2nd and goes on until the next day.

Lily told me that when the Spanish came to Peru they placed crosses on many of the religious sites of the Inca people. You see crosses placed all over the place round here – in plazas, on hills, half way up flights of steps! Also, some families have crosses in their homes. The family living near to Lily have two crosses which have been in their family for about one hundred years, given to their grandparents, I think, if I understood correctly, because of their ‘great faith’. The ‘cross parties’ are held to remember that Jesus died on the cross.

After my class Lily asked if I’d like to walk past and see the party. Actually, everyone had gone into the house so Lily asked if we could go in. She took me to see the two crosses which were on a table in a little courtyard in the middle of the house. They were ‘dressed’ in embroidered gold drapes and surrounded by flowers, pink fairy lights and the biggest candles I’ve ever seen. There were also two ‘recuerdos’ which are sort of gold embroidered banners with the family names and dates of the party – when a family hosts a religious party of some sort they get these ‘recuerdos’ made to display and keep as a souvenir. (Lily has one in her house to remember when her family hosted service for Day of the Child – 6th Jan I think.)

The people at the party were all sitting round the edge of the courtyard and another adjacent room. The room to the left was a little kitchen with tin roof, mud floor and guinea pigs running about. Some cooked guinea pigs arrived in a big bucket while we were there. The party hosts (two ladies) wore red sashes with gold embroidered writing with their names and the date. To be honest everyone looked a bit bored – a 24 hour party does seem rather long!

All week we’ve heard bangers going off and these are also something to do with the Day of the Cross.

Another thing I learnt from Lily is that the Virgin Mary is often depicted in a rather strange shape. She is drawn in religious pictures here in a sort of mountain shape, her head at the top and her dress coming down very widely. Apparently this is because the Spanish wanted to make her the substitute for the Inca Mother Earth. The indigenous people here could understand the concept of a Father and Son from their own religious stories and beliefs, but they thought there must be a mother as their own Mother Earth figure was very important. So the Spanish substituted the Virgin Mary for Mother Earth, even depicting her in this mountain shape. Lily says that this is the reason why the Virgin Mary is thought of as so important here.

Our church

We decided on a church to join around the end of April after visiting 5 or 6 on Sundays. We found it through a long series of connections which, in a way, go back 17 years to the time Roland first came to Latin America!

Last autumn we went to our friend Celia’s retirement party in London. Celia worked in Peru for 20 years and it was through her we were first inspired to visit Peru in 1997. At the party we met Don Ford, who used to head up Latin Link, and through whom Roland was first inspired to come to Latin America in 1990. We told Don about our plans to come to Peru. A couple of months later, we received an email from Don because a friend of his in New Zealand is due to come to Cusco in July. He thought we would be interested as the conference is about Christian-run micro-enterprise projects. The organisation running the conference is based in the States but they have partners in many parts of the world and their Peruvian partner is working in Cusco. So we were excited that there might be something going on already in Cusco that we could join with or at least learn from. And we hoped there might be church connected with it we could join.

Roland managed to speak to the head of the organisation in the States before we came out here, and he was very positive about Roland’s possible involvement. He said there was a volunteer from America working in Cusco with the project who we should meet when we got here.

So, finally, after a few weeks of being here, we managed to get in touch with Devin, the volunteer working here, and find out more. It turns out that she goes to the church where the project originally started about 7 years ago. We have been going there for just over a month now and really like it. We get on well with the pastor, Americo, and his wife, Mary. They have lots of ideas and plans for the church which sound good. Sammy is pleased because the service is short! We were all finding the 2-3 hour services on other churches a bit much! Mary does a fun kids group for his age and there is space at the back for Benjamin to play. The morning meeting is quite small (it’s recently started with about 30 people) but the more established evening meeting has about 70.

Pictures of a family event arranged by the church in a poor area of town

The church is called Centro Familiar Cristiano and meets in a rented building on the outskirts of the centre of Cusco. We can walk to it in about 40 minutes. It’s quite near to an area we’re looking at living longer term, so that would be useful! The office of the micro-enterprise project is located there too. The church was planted by Americo and Mary from one in Lima 12 years ago.

They have another project associated with the church too – a project which owns a big house on a mountainside near here. The vision is for it to be a retreat centre with a feeding programme for children, plus perhaps a children’s home in the future. The church also does outreaches in several poor areas and have one church plant already started and another one planned.