After a brief Salsa lesson in Spanish class, I never really thought about the dance while here in Urubamba. Absent from my life were the distinctive shuffles and twirls of Salsa-- at least until an awkward encounter in the Discoteque. We were out dancing with some Peruvian host siblings. The lights were flashing hypnotically, the songs were popular and familiar, and all was right with the world. Then I heard it: The music was shifting. The pop lyrics were fading and a Latin beat was creeping in. I felt a distinctive sway in the crowd and realized that we were pairing off-- It was time to confront Salsa. I ended up dancing (very, very poorly) with Claire's shy host sister Veronica. I was embarrassed and the awkwardness was palpable. I fumbled some twirls, lost the beat, and at one point may have lost a shoe. It was ugly. But somehow, from that scary disgusting incident a new relationship was born. Veronica saw me as a comical (but doubtlessly charming) figure and I managed to expend a lifetime's worth of embarrassment in one evening. Now I smile at the memory. Its nothing major, but when I see Veronica we smile and nod, closer than before.
--“Kenny, do you know any stories about snakes?”
--”Like Adam and Eve?”
--”Heheh, no. No, other stories.”
--”Uhh... I don't think so, do you?”
--”Well, there is a small village near Urubamaba ...”
That was the introduction to the little conversation that changed filter days. I'm using the term “conversation” in a loose sense to include exchanges where other people talk and I nod, say “si, claro” (yes, clearly), and occasionally toss out a couple of vulnerable sentences in my two-month old Spanish. My patient partner in this instance was Ernestina, the Peruvian full-time Pro-World staff member on the water filters project. Ernestina is a short muscular woman with long black hair and the face of a trickster. I had been working with her every Tuesday and Thursday for the past month to mix, weigh, and finally press clay into ceramic filters. After a few fizzled attempts at small talk, we had settled into a routine of productive silence punctuated by short requests and instructions. The work was rewarding in the long run. And dull in the moment. Things changed on the day of the snake talk-- On that day I was startled, disgusted and impressed. Finally, from the ashes of an uncomfortable conversation, a new relationship was born.
Ernestina and I were mixing things up. Instead of working with wet dirt (clay) we were working with dry dirt. More specifically, we were leveling a lumpy patch of ground in order to construct a new kiln. 11 o'clock in the morning found us lugging rocks around to fill in holes. The silence was comfortable and the sun was not. As I pried one of the last rocks from the ground, out slithered the sort of animal that one would expect to slither. The sort of animal that squeezes meters of itself into small unexpected spaces to that it can surprise you with deceptive speed, a flash of exotic-colored scales, and bite that floods you with toxins and brings your stay in Peru to a tragic and sudden end. At least, those were my frantic thoughts when the snake appeared. In reality, it was about a foot and a half long, brown, sedentary, and probably generally benign. I froze. The snake froze. Ernestina did not freeze. Ernestina took a pickaxe and bashed the snake repeatedly while explaining that this type of snake was very hard to kill. She was more than up to the challenge. When finished, she must have seen the shocked and disgusted look on my face because she told me that the little guy was, in fact, poisonous and that it would have been a very bad idea to let him run around in the filters work shop. I was impressed (and disgusted and still a bit startled).
We sat down for a break, and the conversation started. When she learned that I had never heard any “proper” snake stories, Ernestina took it upon herself to educate me with some folklore from her childhood. The stories were horrifying. I spent the first few minutes doubting my Spanish and the rest of the time politely nodding and trying to stop my jaw from dropping off my face. I don't think this family friendly blog post needs to go into more detail, except to say that if you ever, EVER think that a snake may have gotten INSIDE your body, you should get an MRI immediately and pray that the snake wasn't pregnant. Yuck.
Somehow though, that 20 minute session of gross-out did the same thing for an 18 year-old gringo and his middle aged Peruvian boss that the great game of gross-out has been doing for elementary school kids for ages: It made us friends. The conversational dam shattered like a tired metaphor and we started talking about her snake-filled childhood. That turned into talk about Killabamba, a nearly mythical source of all of Peru's tastiest treats-- chocolate, coffee, mangoes and the like. Then to food, to cooking, to the traditional delicacies of Peru. Ernestina wanted to learn to cook American food, so I invited her to our volunteer dinners (we take a night every week to cook for each other). I wanted to learn more about chocolate so she told me about the process that takes weird fruit to beautiful bean to molten brown happiness.
With the silence broken, filter days became more than morally rewarding manual labor. They became morally rewarding manual labor with conversation. They became a time to talk with someone who shared my interest and curiosity for food. One day, Ernestina brought in cocoa beans from Killabamba and, together with another volunteer, we roasted, shelled, and ground them into bar form. I will dream of the smell till the day I die.
I see that snake talk as a turning point in my time in Peru. The obvious reason is the impact on my work here-- it made me a friend at work which in turn made work richer. It marked one of the first substantive connections I made with a Peruvian outside my host family. But it meant a lot to me in a more general sense as well. I realized that I (or anyone really, there was no special role I played in this) could fly thousands of miles to a totally new country with a totally new language and bond with someone over something as silly as snake-based horror stories. A humanist might cite this an an example of some universal connectedness. A cynic would point out the insufficient sample size of my data set. An herpetologist would just accept it as proof of the fascinating nature of snake talk. Fortunately, I don't need to try and mine this incident for more meaning. I have a new friend at work and a great opportunity to learn more about Peruvian food. I'm happy.
