Our First Day in Ayacucho

Although Göran and I wouldn’t have minded getting up a bit later than the usual 6 AM, today we had a good motivation to get up: the four of us were going to go to the market together with Iván for a fresh fruit juice, pan, and to do groceries (thanks to Iván without getting ripped off). It was a great morning but with our extensive shopping list it took us a while to get home.

Iván is a kind-hearted man with a passion for theatre, arts, and music in a country where people do not see much value in that and mostly aren’t able or willing to pay for it either. Most of the little money he has he pours into the theatre he built in his backyard, costumes and other resources for grown-up and child theatre, and creative sessions for poor kids on the street. He has showed me pictures and videos of those. They are largely children from very poor family backgrounds (some of them don’t even have the money for shoes!) and he along with his small team sets up easels and supplies for them to paint, organizes dance lessons, and gives them access to materials to try acrobatic tricks once a day a few times each year. The happiness on those kids’ faces was so genuine and precious. A reminder once again of how lucky we are to have relatively easy access to all those things if we want to. Although some families in the Netherlands or Germany sadly cannot afford this either. How lucky they would be to have someone like Iván and his team there, who give their kids such a joyful and creative day for free. On top of that Iván also makes music for children, organizes normal grown-up theatre and opens his home to stray international cyclists venturing through Peru. Apart from his love for the arts and creativity, he also has a passion for plants and, you guessed it, cycling. This can be clearly seen around his house, where most walls and corners are decorated with a great variety of different plants brightening the place up. Above the small cyclist accommodation in his patio-like backyard, different collector’s bicycles hang from the ceiling or lean against the walls. The whole place was a good reflection of the interests and kindness of the man who built and decorated it. Why am I writing all of this? First of all, because I like painting a picture for our blog readers to get a sense of where we are and who we are with. Secondly, because I feel this section is well-deserved to give recognition for how Iván is and what he does. And last but not least, by giving you this impression, the next thing I am about to write makes a bit more sense.

At the market, fruits, vegetables, and other staples weren’t the only thing we bought for once. Today, we also bought some pots of paint. Most of Iván’s larger plants are in old buckets of either paint, vegetable oils, motor oils and the like, with the commercial texts still on them. To brighten it up a bit and make them more worthy of his healthy growing plants, I decided to paint some of his flower pots, while Göran wanted to give the men’s bathroom a bit of a glow-up. I like to think that we made Iván happy with the results of our creative labour but to be honest I am not entirely sure. We asked for his permission beforehand, of course, and he was very enthusiastic and appreciated the thought. The results? I don’t know for sure. Göran and I are happy with them though and it looks better than it did before.

While Göran and I were letting our creative juices flow, Jacques went to the local Memorial Museum. Between the 1980s and 2000 Ayacucho was the center of a violent conflict between the Maoist guerrilla movement ‘Shining Path’ and the Peruvian state military. Shining Path, led by Abimael Guzmán, launched a “people’s war”, as he called it. Although their communist beliefs meant that they were FOR the people and the working class, their methods were marked by assassinations, massacres, and terror against not only authorities but also civilians. The civilians whose rights they were supposedly fighting for. In response, the government deployed troops against Shining Path. However, they also ended up committing widespread human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial killings. The struggle escalated into one of Latin America’s bloodiest internal wars of the twentieth century, claiming around 70,000 lives, most of them poor peasants and indigenous villagers. The Memorial Museum commemorates this violent period and the innocent lives that were lost.

After this heavy topic, it almost feels wrong to turn back to telling you about the rest of our day. But since that is the original purpose of this blog, letting you travel with us from the comfort of your homes, I will simply carry on. For lunch we made use of the stove with frying pan we had available to us here and I made banana cinnamon pancakes which we ate with peanut butter, dulce de leche, and fruit (not all at once obviously). We invited Iván to have some and he loved them and immediately asked for the recipe. In the evening, chef Jacques prepared mashed potatoes, sautéed vegetables and organic red lentil burgers which were delicious.