(Dutchess Beat writer Dan Bush is currently working as a freelance journalist in South America, and he’ll be providing periodic stories on his travels here in the Beat).
When the highway reached Yanomayo in the mid-1990s, it signaled the beginning of a great change. Before its arrival, the Quechua community remained as isolated geographically and culturally from mainstream Peruvian society as it had been for centuries. For the first time, it was accessible to four-wheel-drive vehicles willing to brave the new but treacherous mountain road, and Yanomayo started receiving visitors. The local municipal authority showed up with men and building materials and erected a modern elementary school. Electricity is rumored to be on its way. A community member is even building a very primitive rural hostel, which will open sometime soon.
“The idea is to attract environment-minded tourists who want to stay for a few days,” said Pedro Sinchi Huaman, an ex-president of Yanomayo and the man who is building the rural hostel. “Now, with the highway, there’s more development.” Huaman was silent for a moment, then added, “We’re thinking of the future.”
Yanomayo is one of more than 30 indigenous communities in the Ollantaytambo district of Urubamba province, in the state of Cusco, Peru. Younger generations are learning Spanish but older community members only speak Quechua, which in its written form looks like this: wachwa (goose), Iman sutiyki (what´s your name?), Karun Purina pisiqtaq k´oqao (a proverb which means ‘a lot of work but not much to eat’). These tiny communities are nestled in the Andean mountains, high above the towns and small cities of the Sacred Valley. Forty-eight families, about 250 people, live in Yanomayo at an elevation of well over 12,000 feet, above the tree line, at an altitude too great for most vegetation. Yanomayo is so high up, in fact, that its people literally live in the clouds.
Every Saturday the community members of Yanomayo stage a marketplace on the highway 12 kilometers south of their home. There, they sell the potatoes they grow as well as a few other things to the vendors and restaurant owners of Ollantaytambo, who drive up in trucks to purchase the produce and haul it back to town. One morning I rode in a large truck up to the market, before switching to a pickup for the last stretch to Yanomayo. The truck had a long flatbed, with five-foot wooden side walls, which was crowded with community members returning from trips to town. I was wedged between an old man and a young mother breast-feeding her baby. The truck labored up the mountain, rattling, shaking, blowing thick clouds of exhaust. The landscape began to change; the Eucalyptus stands along the road thinned out and then disappeared altogether, replaced by low bushes and cactus. The hillsides were covered in stone terraces, unchanged since Inca times and still in use. The truck stopped at the villages of Huilloc and Patacancha to drop passengers and pick up new ones. After this last village the highway deteriorated seriously. It was full of holes, zigzagged like a buzzing fly, and narrowed to a sliver. As we neared the market place the climate turned wet and gray. Streams of runoff from the snow-capped peaks in the distance poured over the road and the truck splashed through them as if it were an amusement park ride.
Finally we arrived at the market, which appeared without warning around another sharp bend in the road. Its location seemed totally random- an unremarkable, one hundred yard stretch of highway. Along both sides, women and men from the community sold potatoes and other assorted things, all of which were piled on blue plastic tarps on the ground. Children played in the dirt road. Everyone wore the traditional bright red ponchos of the Quechua of that region, and matching cloth hats with chin straps and tassels. Despite the cold and wind, men, women and children wore sandals. The market was a wildflower of activity on the otherwise drab and desolate mountainside.
Victor Sinchi Cruz and I squatted in the dust at the roadside market drinking chicha out of a water bottle. Cruz is the current president of Yanomayo. Presidents are elected every two years and serve as the liaison between the community and the municipal and provincial authorities in the valley below. Cruz travels to Ollantaytambo and the larger nearby provincial capital of Urubamba often to meet with government leaders and discuss the needs of his community. Cruz is a quiet, shy man of 42 who speaks very softly. He is an educated community member, having studied in Ollantaytambo, and speaks better Spanish than most of his peers. While we spoke, men approached him to say hello, ask a question, or make a small request. Cruz would listen thoughtfully, nod, and then answer in a whisper.
Yanomayo survives on potatoes, said Cruz, practically the only crop which can survive at Yanomayo´s altitude. Each family in the community grows its own and sells between one and two thousand kilos of potatoes a year. They also breed alpacas and llamas, and sell their meat and wool-like fiber. People buy, as well as trade for, the goods they cannot grow or make in Yanomayo. “Community members don’t make a lot of money. We only make what we need,” said Cruz. “No more.” This tiny declarative phrase is tacked onto the end of most sentences by community members and is used, at different times, as a plea, announcement, suggestion and order.
The municipal authorities help Yanomayo and the other communities, said Cruz, but not much. Sometimes they provide small donations of clothes, food or building materials. No more. Community members do not receive free health care, Cruz continued. If someone is hurt or gets sick, they travel to the health center at Ollantaytambo. “But to receive health care you need insurance and we don’t have any,” said Cruz. “It’s very expensive.” When community members can’t pay, they’re turned away at the door.
“Municipal authorities support some communities, but it’s not sustained,” said Marco Centeno Bendezu, who served as governor of Urubamba province, where Yanomayo is located, for eight months in 2007. “They give help when they have money, because they have to, but they don’t make permanent projects.” Bendezu talked while he drove his pickup from the market toward Yanomayo. Behind us in the back seat where several people from Yanomayo, and the cab was crowded with many more catching rides home.
The road was soon enveloped by a range of clouds which descended from a nearby mountaintop, revealing its snowy summit for the first time. In the mist we didn’t see a pack of llamas, and when we surprised them the big animals bounded off of the highway with the grace of gazelles. A majority of Yanomayo’s houses are clustered close together, but some are kilometers away and as we passed these isolated farmsteads people heard our truck engine and came down from their hillside homes. They appeared out of the mist suddenly and without warning. Bendezu would slam his truck to a halt and they climbed into the back, until it was full. One woman scrambled down to the road with a small child in her arms. She came to the passenger side, and handed me her son. “Here, take him,” she said. “I’ll be up there later.” The little boy rode in my lap the rest of the way to Yanomayo.
The community was a loose grouping of family compounds in a small, uneven valley. The single modern building was the five-grade elementary school, built of concrete. Nearby, past the assembly building where the community holds its monthly meetings, stood the home of Hirardo, 35, which was almost identical to the rest in Yanomayo. It consisted of two stone buildings enclosed by a low wall with a wooden entrance gate. Hirardo’s potato fields were nearby. One of the buildings was a storage space and the other served as the family home. This small structure was built of stone and had a thatched roof. Its interior space was the size of a one-car garage. The family slept on an elevated platform of thick wooden planks. Across from the beds was a fireplace. Above it hung modern cooking implements; pans, knives, a boiling pot. The walls were lined with tools, among them a pickaxe, a kind of hoe, a wooden club. The earth floor was beaten into a soft, padded cushion. One of Hirardo’s daughters sat before the fireplace, playing with a doll. The little house was warm and used; each nook, nail and flat surface was for something. As Hirardo prepared a plate of potatoes and cheese he handled his material possessions with great care and attention. The house was lit by the gray light of outdoors.
“If we had electricity, there’d be more development,” said Huaman, Cruz’s predecessor as president. “But here more than anything we need help with education and health.” Yanomayo is still difficult to reach, said Huaman, but if the highway improves over time perhaps non-governmental organizations and volunteer groups will begin to show up.
“Year by year, Yanomayo is changing,” said Huaman. “In the city it’s all money, no more. Here we sell our potatoes and with that we maintain ourselves. But the work is very hard. The earth is poor.” When Huaman was a child he dreamed of leaving the potato fields for a career in engineering. After finishing grade school in Yanomayo, he continued studying in Ollantaytambo but his family ran out of money. “If I had kept studying I wouldn’t be here. I would have had a career,” said Huaman, who is in his mid-30s and has four children. “For me now, it’s a little late. But I want my children to study. Not to stay the same as us. To have somewhat better lives. No more.”