Finding Home and Raising Kids in a Life Abroad - Puno, Peru Chapter 1 Part 2
- Deborah Llewellyn
- 2 hours ago
- 15 min read
Finding A House
I am drawn to Spanish colonial architecture above all other home designs and dreamed of finding such a magical place to live. I pictured an imposing wooden entrance door adorned with ornamental hinges and a giant lock that opens into a central courtyard. The rooms of the house would be built around the circumference of a courtyard. A fountain big enough for wading. Bougainvillea vines dripping from the covered walkway that provide protection as we left one room and entered another. In my imagination, I am reading in the courtyard, shaded by a big floppy hat, while Bronwyn captures flightless beetles for her bug house.
While we searched for my dream house, we stayed in the Sillustani Hotel. Each day I left the hotel and pushed Bronwyn’s stroller on a jarring walk along cobblestone streets that radiated from the Plaza de Armas. The central town square was anchored by a colossal cathedral. Ever hopeful, I kept my eyes open for a Se Alquilla sign tucked into the ironwork of a bubbled glass window. Houses such as the one I wanted were generally held by a family for centuries. When opportunity knocked, they moved to lower elevations in Arequipa or Lima, but often kept the old family home in Puno, vacant and waiting for their occasional return. My spirits dropped by the day.
One night in the hotel dining room, I overheard two American foreigners talking about an early childhood research project that they were wrapping up. I stood and spoke to them, hoping there might be a possibility that I could get involved. They glanced at me, dismissively, and went back to their discussion. It highlighted my exasperation at having to abandon my satisfying career as director of a ground-breaking parenting and early childhood center in Durham, North Carolina (Parents Involved in Preschool Education – PIPE) to arrive in this freezing cold, dismal place, struggling to breathe and pull myself together, figuring out how to start a new life as a stranger in a strange land. Somebody to nobody.
Fortunately, I enjoyed exploring the town as I searched for a place to live. Puno was founded in 1668 by Antonio Fernando de Castro. The town served as a crucial administrative hub and transport route for silver between Bolivia and the Pacific. With only two miles of flat land, between the shores of Lake Titicaca and the Andes foothills, the town was scrunched in tight, so it didn’t take long to walk the historic section near the cathedral.
Bronwyn and I liked to pay a visit to the cathedral on our daily walk. It was built to serve the Spanish inhabitants and to evangelize the Ayamara people. The interior was ornamented with abundant gold trim, intricate wooden carvings, dozens of skillfully rendered religious oil paintings, sculptures of the saints, and artfully rendered silver chalices perched on communion tables.
After the Spanish conquered the Incas, they brought religious painters from Europe to teach the highly artistic indigenous population to paint angels and saints. They set up a painting school in Cusco to supply art across the altiplano to aid in conversion of the natives. The Cusco School is a famous religious art movement that originated in Cusco during the 16th -18th centuries. The tradition, which continues today, blends European painting techniques with local Andean culture, featuring heavy use of gold leaf, bright red and earth colors, and native plants and animals.
On the steps of the cathedral, vendors sold candles and Milagros (silver or tin charms representing something desired) to the Ayamara women and men who came to pray over a crisis in their lives, and there were many – not enough rain or too much rain; blindness; weak lungs from the silver mines; a leg injury that prevented clearing the fields and planting crops; not enough potatoes and quinoa saved to get them through the hungry times between planting and harvest, and always, the children dying from pneumonia or dysentery. It was humbling to sit in an out-of-the-way three-hundred-year-old wooden pew balancing the beauty and pain around us.
On our daily walk, we passed a small tourist shop and met Christiane Lefebvre, an architect and designer from Canada. In those days, tourists were as rare as green vegetables, so she was delighted to meet new foreigners moving to town. We became close friends with Christiane and her husband, Augusto Dreyer, during our first year in Puno. Augusto’s father had been a well-known landscape painter and once-heralded as the national artist of Peru. The Dreyer family opened the Museum Municipal Carlos Dreyer in the old family home to display artifacts of history and archeology, as well as Dreyer’s paintings.
Christiane worked with local skilled artisans to produce wooden carvings, lead-free pottery and stylish alpaca sweaters, which she sold in her shop along with antiques. She was interested in the rich culture and opened my eyes to local folk art.
The pins, made from silver and tin, were often decorated with colored glass and fish for fertility. They were used to secure woolen mantas such as the woman is wearing in the painting. Elaborate ones are worn for special fiestas. Christiane worked with the potter, Andre Lope, helping him acquire lead free clay. She sold his dishes and candlesticks in her shop.
My interest grew to collect stone carvings and silver pieces with the idea that I would will my collections back to an Andean Museum of Anthropology. While they didn't hold much sanctity for the current gereration, who dug them up and sold them in the market, I knew that one day they would appreciate this beautiful heritage. I was attracted to the silver and tin pendants hanging with fish (fertility sign) that women wore to close their woolen mantas (shawls). I was fascinated by the small stone carvings that a hundred years prior were buried as offerings to the earth mother, dug up once a year and consecrated with abundant chichia (corn beer).
Christiane and Augusto invited us to dinner at their home, Casa Corregidor, which was built by the priest, Sylvestre de Valdes, in 1668. It backed up to the Dreyer museum and shared a wall. We entered through a discreet door that did not prepare me for sheer delight. It was the place I dreamed of living. Christiane had remodeled it to maintain the integrity of the structure but added modern plumbing and a beautiful functional kitchen, carved furniture throughout and the central courtyard was enhanced with archeological artifacts.
After our first year in Puno, Christina and Augusto decided to move back to Canada for a year and offered to rent Casa Corregidor to us. Sadly, we declined because at that time, we were less than a year from leaving Puno. We decided it was too much trouble to pack our belongings and move up the hill, even for a dream house. The decision was fortuitous. Soon after the Dreyer’s left, the Sendero Luminosa, a Maoist insurgency group, blew up their home. But that’s another story.
Going back to the initial house hunt, we received word that the Canadians were shutting down their development project and the tiny four-room adobe cottage they had used would be available for rent. The house was located on a traffic circle where trucks passed carrying cargo and people from Bolivia.
I had taken that same route, at age twenty-seven, when Charles took me on my first whirlwind tour of his beloved Andes. Riding in the back of a cattle truck was one of the few ways to go overland from LaPaz to Puno. The road was a packed dirt and took three days, but Charles balanced the likelihood of getting across the border (our passports had been stolen) with a bearable level of discomfort, and besides he wanted me to see Lake Titicaca.
I probably noticed our future home as our truck pulled into town. However, my mind was on washing three days of road dust off my body and soothing the sunburn along the part in my hair, bleeding and crusted with scab.
The little house on the round-about had two bedrooms, a functioning toilet, a living/dining room with a fireplace, a small office/guest room and a kitchen the size of a wet bar. There was electricity but over the two years, we were often without due to shortages or terrorist sabotage, and the propane for the stove was in short supply. We learned to stock up on what we could when we could and the fireplace was a lifesaver. The house had no heat to brace from an average annual temperature of 41 degrees, dipping to below 20 F at night. The days warmed up when the intense sun was out. To store the heat, my clever husband painted black the sunny side of the house, along the exterior bedroom walls, and even at night the thick adobe mud walls radiated warmth if the sun had shone that day.
As a USAID contractor, we were provided with American furniture and appliances, including washing machine and dryer. The Lima office loaned us a welcome kit of linens, pots and pans, etc. until our shipment came, which took six months instead of three. If we hadn’t brought our down feather sleeping bags with us, we would have frozen at night. We bought two electric space heaters for the bedrooms, which, along with the exterior black wall, took the chill from the bedrooms at night. One heater nearly led to a catastrophe the morning Bronwyn flung her sleeping bag onto the space-heater as she bounced out of bed in her footed jammies. Luckily only part of the sleeping bag was burned and still usable when we detected a smoldering odor coming from her room.
A wall stood between the front of the house and the street. It had a built-in planter along the entire wall and I envisioned this as my welcoming flower garden. Filled with zeal to make a house a home, I bought hearty marigolds in the market. I repeatedly planted marigolds because overnight they disappeared. I reasoned that if the thief got enough flowers, then perhaps he/she would be done with it and leave the rest for me. That never happened so I gave up. While the thieves would not have taken the flowers from a local, being a foreigner marked us as having too much, for which an occasional thievery would bring us down a notch. It did.
The fenced area behind the house was surfaced in concrete where the Canadians parked several project vehicles. Surrounded by tall metal walls, it was an eyesore, but a safe place for Bronwyn to roller skate without being seen by people walking along the side of our house to Lake Titicaca, which was one block behind our house. We had no views of the lake but understood its proximity when the Lake flooded, turning our car park into a muddy pond, splashing inches from our back door.
From the front window, we had a delightful view of daily life. Whenever it was time for one of the many annual festivals, the costumed dancers and musicians passed by our house. Bronwyn stood on the sofa and watched from the window.
While this wasn't the house we hoped for, we made it into a cozy home and appreciated the ample sunlight that would not have been present in an old home in the colonial part of town. We finally did get to carefully poke around one of those decaying old houses when the family held a sale of the furniture. Unfortunately, I didn't hear about the sale until the last afternoon, but in time to buy an iron bed covered in gold leaf for $100 for Bronwyn.
Bit by bit we bought local art and artisan furniture that we carried around with us, from one country to the next, and now lives in our current home. We met a wood carver who lived in Juliaca and worked only with hand tools in an adobe workshop with one small window to let in light. He built us a six seater trestle dining table and this round breakfast table. We have his chairs as well. They are crude and we no longer use them but hard to toss out when you remember how they were made and the special artist who produced wonderful pieces with so little.
The house came with a maid, Juanna. I like to cook and there were only five rooms to clean. I didn’t know what to do with a maid. Juanna lived in a one-room out-building with her 8-year old son. When I expressed dismay, the Canadians told me that if I sent Juanna on her way, then she would have no place to live and no money for food and school fees. Adding to her lack of utility, she was unable to do our shopping in the market because I did not yet speak enough Spanish to make a list of needed goods.
An incident further exhibited my lack of understanding about how to use a maid. I had been invited to tea at the wife of a military police head. She and some other English speaking military wives were eager to practice English and also wanted to invite me to enroll Bronwyn in the military pre-school. The tea-time was cut short when I looked at my watch and declared I had to go in order to make lunch for my maid. They looked at me as if I were a Martian. It is one of the many stories my husband loves to tell about my adjustment to living abroad.
Bronwyn figured out what to do with a maid quicker than I did. She was glancing at an American magazine and saw a picture of a child cleaning a very messy bedroom. Her interpretation of the picture was immediate. “He’s getting his room organized so his maid can clean it.”
We enrolled Bronwyn in the preschool for $3 per month, along with bringing their own supplies - paper, scissors, crayons, and a set of tabletop blocks. The three-year-olds class teacher’s methods followed many familiar practices – puppetry, block building, story time, and art projects. None of the children spoke English, which we hoped would help Bronwyn learn Spanish through play. The school had a teacher who taught English, but Bronwyn never realized that the woman was speaking English; it was that unintelligible. The teacher arrived each day highly decorated with rouge, blue eye shadow, and red lipstick. She also wore high-heeled shoes, the first and only time I saw someone attempt the rough cobblestone streets in wobbly shoes. Bronwyn referred to her as the clown teacher, assuming that she was there to entertain the children, never realizing she was trying to teach the children English. They should have hired Bronwyn.
In Puno, children from all the schools marched in parades around the Plaza to celebrate national festivals and local folklore events. Bronwyn loved this, and felt like a celebrity when locals from the sidewalk pointed at the gringa with pelo roja (foreigner with red hair). At one point Bronwyn was named madre of the pre-school soccer team. She wore a fancy dress and crown, was draped in a banner, and dwarfed by a bouquet of flowers popped in her arms, all for the price of her dad sponsoring the football team with new uniforms. All of it early training for how to be a diplomat – smile, show grace, and without complaining, spend many weekends at commemorative events that go on for hours when you’d rather be searching for pottery shards on the mountainside.
Bronwyn loved to go to the countryside. She groaned and complained when asked to walk in town, preferring a stroller. In the country-side, however, she had high energy for hiking and climbing. We would take weekend visits in our VW bug and investigate off road ruins including “chulpas” or tombs built by Incas and their predecessors.
These large cut stone structures have small tunnels at the base that only a child Bronwyn’s size could enter. One day, when we weren’t looking, Bronwyn slipped in and emerged carrying a human bone!
We also took Bronwyn to visit Precolonial graveyards when we visited Lima. She was enthralled to see the human skulls and bones, as well as pottery shards. She claims the photo of her in the graveyard is her favorite of childhood pictures.
Puno had an old, flea infested, movie theater. The Goonies was playing. We took Bronwyn to see it as she hadn’t had much movie experience. We warned her that this had scary parts but to remember that it was imaginary, not real. Three quarter of the way through, when the kids were screaming as the pirate skeletons were fighting Bronwyn asked, “When are the scary parts happening?” Another day, there was a poster of Bug’s Bunny, indicating a children’s matinee would be shone. To our delight, the animated film was about an Inca child and the Temple of the Sun (where we frequently explored) for which they had no film poster, only the one of Bugs Bunny.
Charles continued to drive the VW beetle for work over rough terrain because Hertz was so reluctant to send us the new Lada they had agreed upon with Westinghouse. He always returned with an interesting story. One day he passed a woman squatted down by the road waiting for a ride. He stopped and offered her a ride in his V W. When she picked up her large bundle he realized that there was a sheep inside. She picked up the sheep and climbed into the car. When they arrived at the point she wanted to disembark, she asked him how much she owed him. His answer, "a photo."
Finally, Herz had no choice. but to come through with the Russian Lada. Driving on the corrugated road to Cusco, he broke the uni-body of the car so that the steering wheel to the front wheels was separated and he had no steering. He took a rock by the road and was able to beat it back in place and drive on to his destination and a mechanic.
Occasionally Charles would take Bronwyn and me out to the campo when he had to inaugurate a water system built with American funding to improve health and sanitation. One stands out in our memory. The Jachutiticaca village was two hours off a paved road, on a peninsula jutting into Lake Titicaca. The road was slick and deep in mud. Our little vehicle did ok until we came to two trucks that had tried to pass each other and ended up stuck in the mud. As passers-by worked to dislodge the trucks, the driver of a Ford truck yelled out at Charles, “See I have a crummy American car.” Charles yelled back: “Yeah, see what I drive – Russian.” They both laughed.
We entered the village through a makeshift goal post covered in Eucalyptus boughs and trumpet flowers. Such a picturesque place –straw-thatched adobe houses, a woman weaving while her children tended the pigs and sheep, the glimmering ultramarine lake in front of us, and behind us, a sheer stone wall with Inca carvings. For an extended amount of time we three sat on the makeshift stage with the head men who gave speeches thanking the U.S. government for the village water system, and told how it was changing their lives.
The spring house was on the hillside so after everyone had said their piece, the men climbed a trail to break a bottle of beer over this new wonderful thing - a proper inauguration. The women set to work dishing out the food –roasted pig and potatoes. Fanta for Bronwyn, the only child, and beer for everyone else. I looked up and noticed that our daughter had let go of her father’s hand, while he examined the pump, and was climbing up the mountain on all fours. I wasn’t concerned. By then she had become as sure-footed as a mountain goat. I went back to helping ladle the quinoa soup and heard a scream. Glancing up, I correctly guessed that one of the worried villagers was trying to pull her back to safety, against her will.
While Charles’s tour of duty included challenging road travel to cover three districts – Puno, Cusco Apurimac and Madre de Dios in the Amazon, we made the most our time when he was in Puno. We still hold memories of cherished family outings and the making of traditions in our new home.
Our first Christmas was a make-do affair. One of our forester friends promised a nice tree from the nursery but he was called away. So we had to ask the other forester who would rather die than cut a tree. We almost choked when he pulled a 1-2 feet spindly thing out of his trunk. “That’s not a very nice tree,” Bronwyn sadly acknowledged. After we made all our own decorations, stringing popcorn for the laurel, Bronwyn declared it to be the best tree ever. We still top our tree with the paper plate angel that Bronwyn made forty-one years ago, with dad’s assistance. We refer to that year as our Charlie Brown Christmas. We bought a few plastic toys from the market to prove Santa had remembered her, though living far from North Carolina, the place she still called home.
Our new Danish friends invited us for a traditional Christmas feast. They had received a box of delicacies from home - smoked fish, dark rye bread, and cheeses. After the unusual (for us) Christmas feast, our family and friends headed for the hills to walk the Inca trails, always hoping to find an un-opened and thus not-looted Inca tomb. We were not only re-inventing Christmas, we were re-inventing ourselves, learning to live well with less, and hold tight to each other, the one sure thing.