I got picked up from the bus station by Roberto and Fabiola that I had gotten in contact with through work away. As we stopped at an apartment they have in the city, a baby goat and two dogs tried to escape through the door closely followed by two kids yelling at them in Spanish to get back inside. Roberto and Fabiola have three kids, Matias (first grade), Augustina (fourth grade) and Valentina (sr. in high school). It looks like they split their time between a house in a small pueblo about two hours into the desert with weekend missions into Arica for food and errands. I really hit the jackpot getting to spend time with this family. The love they have for each other and their happiness is just so obvious only after spending half an hour with them.
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| Fabiola, Val, and I in the town square |
About six (I think?) months ago they moved from a city in the south, but the family was having a lot of health troubles and stress troubles so they made a collective decision to move to a place with a much slower and more relaxing pace. Now they say (translating as close to verbatim as I can remember) "that while they used to have money and be able to buy anything they wanted, now they have less money but they all have their health and happiness". They get to sit down to two or three meals together every day as a family and talk about sports, movies, and random stuff. They didn't speak much English, so I got a crash course in trying to remember all the Spanish that I learned a whillllle ago. They were nice enough to slow it down and pick topics I could follow, like movies and soccer tournaments and the work they were doing around the house.
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| Panorama of their lovely house in the valley. |
I'd come to help Fabiola with her garden, the the river was so dry that they could hardly get any water to the plants so I was essentially just one of her host kids. She showed me how to cook some stuff, but generally my job for meals was dicing tomatoes for the tomato salad they always had with lunch and dinner. Fun fact, they peel the tomatoes before they dice them. Try that sometime. And it's not like I eat tomatoes much, so I was pretty much useless. I also did some dishes and cleaning to try to earn my keep.
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| Ha. |
Robert and a guy named Cheo were working together to build a building next to their house. I believe it will be used for guests like workawayers to use. I was their first workawayer! Roberto and Cheo were filling up bags with adobe and placing them in rows to make the walls. The adobe is a great insulator and its apparently a good technique for earthquake-safe houses as well. The run a length of barbed wire over each new row of adobe to help it stick together.
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| The walls for the new buildings, (partially built) |
I'm not sure if the earthquakes are following me or what but there was a 4.0 centered pretty close to Arica, when I was back there after staying in Codpa for the week. Hrmph. Jk. Chile has a lot of them, pretty frequently.
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| One of Roberto and Filipa's friends is in charge of taking all of these birth, death, and marriage records and creating digital records. They date all the way back to 1901 in these books. |
Anywho, I got to see and participate in a lot of really fun stuff during my week. We walked up to see some petroglyfs from indigenous tribes that predate the Incas. Lots of suns, llamas, lizards and cool designs. Fabiola showed me some random stuff they have dug up while doing their construction. Pieces of cloth from mummies, animal bones, and gourds.
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| The second oldest church in Chile! |
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| Kittens! |
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| Ancient terraces for farming |
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| View of the valley from the petroglyfs. |
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| Lizard! |
I also got to go help with the younger kids' end of the year party and watch them perform in an a show as parrots in the main town square. They made masks with colors and feathers on them. Pretty cute!! One of the teachers also wore a costume that was a paper-mache giant puppet. He wore the body on his head and used his arms to move the arms of the giant. It looked awesome and exhausting. The whole costume was about eight or ten feet tall!
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| This is first through fourth grade, in one class |
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| Me with Val and the parrots. :) |
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| Val and I with the giant! |
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| Soy un pajaro! |
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| Props to the parents that sent their kids a fifth for a school project. |
I got to participate in a ceremony asking Pachamama, or the Mother of the Earth to protect their new building. It meant sipping some different types of alcohols and then pouring the rest of the cup on the earth for Pachamama. After the ceremony, the man performing it stayed and we had an asado or bbq while Cheo and his friend Nacho played some music and sang. Asado is delicious btw. They really know their grill stuff here.
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| Getting ready for the ceremony. |
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| Did I mention the stars were GORGEOUS from Codpa? Zero light polution. Orion! Upside down though. |
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| Magellanic galaxies again. |
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| Trying some local wine and seeing where it was made. Apparently Roberto had to reassure him that I was old enough to drink the wine |
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| Baby pomegranate! |
After heading back into their apartment in Arica, I got to take a day trip to Peru! Roberto owns a little store that sells clothing in the markets, and its much cheaper to get some of the clothes in Peru. I was so far north in Chile that a bus ride to Peru took about an hour! We wandered around after they picked out the shirts that they had on their shopping list. I had told them I loved looking at markets, so they took me to the main one in Tacna. Much more like the markets I loved in Asia. Meat slabs and whole plucked chickens sitting out on a table. New for me were the goat heads and the big wood saws they were using to cut the meat into more managable pieces for customers. We picked up some fruits I had never seen before and some cocoa beans. I grabbed some quinoa to cook for dinners once I left on Monday (so cheap!!!).
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| All sorts of flours! |
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| Similar to a passionfruit, and sooo good. |
Roberto and Cheo are mad fans of Colo Cola, a Chilean club soccer team. Roberto maintains they are the team of the common person, but any time he would go on a rant explaining why Colo Colo is the best, Fabiola and Val would roll their eyes at him hard. They had lost a game during the week, but Sunday, there were two games being played simultaneously that would decide the winner of the Copa de Chila. Before Colo Colo could even start, a massive fight erupted between fans. The players were yelling at them to cut it out, as was most of the stadium, but they stop them from hitting each other with belts and pipes, knocking over journalist's cameras, and shooting fireworks at each other. The game got cancelled, but Cola Colo won based on points, so we headed out to the main square to join in some celebratory festivities aka beer, fireworks and jumping around in the square. It was a sight to behold. There were a couple of dogs that realllly hated the fireworks and kept trying to bite them. I was seriously scared they were going get blown up. But all was well.
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| Booze and fireworks! |
They next day, a new workawayer appeared just as I was getting ready to go, so it was nice to meet her briefly. She was from belgium, and a gluten free, vegan hitchhiker. An interesting lady. I truly hope she enjoys Codpa. It was a wonderful week with a very special family, and I was genuinely sad when I had to leave.
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| The panorama from El Morro, which overlooks the city and the port of Arica |
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| The Pacific ocean! |
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| So many different kinds and colors of tidepool life! |
After that I was on a 9 hour bus ride down to the San Pedro de Atacama desert! Still kicking myself that I never got a picture of the pet goat.
