Paper-chain dolls in Urubamba

Imagine you are in a small village in Peru. It is a very hot day; scorching the backs of your legs and the top of your head. The sky is tall and blue and very clear. You are walking slowly along a dirt road, carrying a bagpack and swinging an imaginary waterbottle, wishing you´d brought it with you, and scanning the horizon for the farmhouse you are staying in. It is your first day of a stint of teaching in the local primary school; you have arrived early, spoken to the principal, and found out that your first class doesn´t start until midday, and it is barely past 9am. You decide to go back to the farmhouse...but you have lost your way.

On one side of the road is a tall mud brick wall. On the other, a row of homes with low doors, hobbit homes, also made from mud brick. The doors are all shut. Everything is quiet. There is not a soul around; everybody is inside, taking refuge from the sweltering heat. You pass an empty-looking shop, selling candy, bottles of water and cigarettes. You stoop low to enter the shop, to see if anybody is inside. No-one.

You continue along the road until you reach a fork in the road. Sweat rolls down your forehead and down the ridge of your nose, the shape of a question mark. Which way now? A lone donkey is tied up next to the mud brick wall, which you have been following for some time. There is literally nobody to ask. The donkey looks at you with soft blinking eyes, as if to say, "don´t ask me. I´m a donkey."

You take a left turn. There is a house painted mauve; the owners must have money to own a house dressed in colour. The house looks familiar. Next to it is a large cactus and a pot of geraniums, also familiar to you, but then again that is a normal sight in Peru. A clear stream murmurs along the right side of the road. You stop and dip your hands in it, then you wash your face. Mmm, it is so cool. The sun really is hot, and the water gives you instant relief.

A young woman is approaching. When she is closer, you ask in Spanish, "do you know where Miguel and Yume live?" She doesn´t know. You can´t remember their surname, either.

So you keep walking and turn another corner. More mud brick homes, cactuses and pots of geraniums. All you can think about is finding the farmhouse, taking your shoes and socks off and sinking into the hammock in the garden.

Several times, you turn back and attempt another route. But every corner is familiar now; the real path to the farmhouse will no longer ring bells even if you are on the right track. You pass the donkey with the absent expression six or seven times. It is almost like a dream, in which you are trapped in a maze. Every corner that you have already passed is etched deeper in your mind, like tracing over the same path on an etch-a-sketch.

There are mud brick walls on almost every side. You can barely see over them; the mountain tops peek over at you, and through a few cracks in the wall you can see a pretty garden, or a cobblestone courtyard decorated with hanging washing, or a field of corn, the scene changing every few steps. You keep following the brook upstream. It leads you to a field with a wall around it. Surely this was the field you took a short cut through early this morning? No, but this one has rows and rows of lettuce; the other was growing corn. Ah, here are the rows of corn, in the next-door field. But wait, there is another field over there, behind it. You lean against the wall, feeling thirsty and exhausted. Peering over the top of the wall and into the field, you see a capuccino-coloured calf rolling around happily amongst the lettuces. A cow, tied up nearby, lets out a loud "moooooooo". You have an urge to let out a loud grown, just like the cow did. Completely lost - for all the cornfields and mudbrick homes appear identical, and you can´t remember which parts of the stream you had skipped over and followed in the early morning - you find a nearby tree to sit under, and bathe in the cool shade.

A dying bee is struggling on the ground. You pick it up and watch it die on the palm of your hand. Then you stand up, walk over to the corner of somebody´s field, and throw it over the wall.

In doing so, you notice a couple of farmers ploughing the land. You wave. A man approaches you - he is elderly, with a wrinked brown face and a green woollen beanie. The beanie is much too small for him, and sits like a parrot on the top of his head. You ask whether he knows Miguel and Yume, and explain that you are looking for their farmhouse. He nods enthusastically - he does know them, in fact Miguel is godfather to his son. He will show you the way. He motions for you to follow him.

You follow behind the man as he swings his cane and leads you across the cornfields, over the bubbling streams, through whispering trees, and along the top of a mudbrick wall. You follow the wall for sometime, making left and right turns, as though you have found a way to cheat in a hedge maze by walking along the tops of the hedges. Somehow, you find the situation extremely funny - you have been wandering the village for over an hour now, when the morning's shortcut had only taken ten minutes - and scrambling behind the farmer, you resist fits of giggles. Eventually you catch sight of Yume and Miguel's garden with the rows of young corn, and the hammock hanging amongst a bed of bright flowers. You are greeted by the farmhouse dogs, Toby and Gitana. Gitana barks furiously at the farmer, probably because of the cane stick he is swinging by his side. A little embarassed at Gitana´s lack of propriety, you thank the farmer profusely and head towards the house for a drink. It is actually nearly time to go back to the school for the first hour of class.

So, this is how I spent my first day in Urubamba, teaching art and English in the village primary school. At least, that is what I was supposed to be teaching...the first hour was a 6th grade communications class! As it was the first day of spring, I broke the class into groups of four and they composed short songs about 'la primavera' (springtime). Although, I had to say, on this particular day it felt like the middle of summer.

The next day, after breakfast in the farmhouse, Yume's eyes shone as she described her idea of getting the 2nd grade kids to draw pictures of springtime on paper plates. Brilliant. Although I was supposed to be teaching painting, the school had absolutely no materials, apart from a couple of sets of coloured textas. So it seemed like a simple idea and I set off (knowing the route to the school pretty well this time, although Toby sensed my inherent lack of direction and accompanied me this time) with a bag full of paper plates and lollies to reward the class with.

Funnily, the teacher sat down with the children to draw and demanded my attention the whole time. When she wasn´t doing that, she was screaming at the children. In truth, I found her quite immature, much more so than her class. Which makes me question the meaning and value of 'maturity'...in that class that day, 'immaturity' and 'childish' took on completely opposite meanings...the kids who are supposed to be 'immature' act spontaneously on genuine feelings...whilst being 'mature' just means that a person has aged, has ripened, into something which is not necessarily better than the child. Becoming older just seems to mean gaining undesirabl traits and characteristics, like greed and desperation, not being spontaenous... My point?? Stay a child as long as you can!!!!

Anyway, I taught the kids English vocabulary about the springtime, and in the class after that we made paper chain dolls. I was a little horrified when the grade one-ers started cutting out their dolls. Forgetting that it is difficult for a small child to use scissors, I walked around the class just in time to see heads, legs and arms being chopped off...leaving a pile of massacred dolls on the teachers desk at the end...I still regret not having time to glue all the pieces together and stringing them up on the classroom wall.

I spent the evenings swinging in the hammock with Toby by my side, reading an Incan drama called 'Ollantay' and wondering what on earth to teach the next day, that doesn´t involve the slaughtering of innocent paperchain dolls.

To be continued...