Thank you God for these wonderful shoes, originally uploaded by pazonada.

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Best photo: view from van as phone falls, originally uploaded by pazonada.

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Juan is going down to feed the bulls, originally uploaded by pazonada.

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There’s internet even here, originally uploaded by pazonada.

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In a town called Jesus, Cajamarca, originally uploaded by pazonada.

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I don’t remember where I left off. Let’s skip ahead, then:

Since the death of my camera (did I mention that? On Tuesday my video camera slipped off a chair and onto a dirt floor and broke, like for reals, so I’m fedexing a new one to Lima, which will arrive next week. Lesson of the year, which I neglected to take seriously: ALWAYS BRING A BACKUP!) — anyway, since then we have continued visiting villages near and far, up the sides of mountains and down cow paths and you name it. M. has graciously used his audio recorder for interviews, and we have both been taking photos. However, there’s still barely any working internet in these villages. It might have worked once, but not anymore, and no techs have come out to fix the problem, despite calls. So it’s the same story in so many places: people need regular tech check-ins, better capacity training perhaps to maintain the machines themselves and create/update web content, cheaper “rent” for the computers and cheaper hourly rates for public payphones (though everyone uses mobiles now) and internet use. Even in the smallest villages, there is usually a huge demand for internet — usually by young people, who teach each other how to use it and need it these days to get info for homework, etc. In some cases there is also competition from schools, where internet has been installed and is cheaper/free for kids to use, but in most cases there is no other internet in the area, and no library either, so the internet cabina proprietor doubles as a teacher/digital librarian. And when it goes down or is super slow, guess who loses out?

In one village, a six-year-old boy Googled for his favorite animated dinosaur video on YouTube and told me all about it. He grabbed some speakers and set them up so he could hear the audio. During this time, the adults watched. This was one of the only places around rural Cajamarca where the internet is still functioning properly. Next to the six-yr-old sat a teenage boy, IM’ing with a girl, explaning that he didn’t love someone else (that’s the only part I caught, but I caught it on video). This is in a house which has dirt floors and no indoor plumbing. Talk about leapfrogging ICT development.

Meanwhile, our nights are somewhat boring. Well, maybe M. isn’t bored on his laptop, but there’s not much to do in Cajamarca besides listen to really good guitar ballads at Usha Usha, watch reality TV and eat manharblanco, fresh caramel. The only reading material I brought was the Bible (“I want a long book I haven’t fully read,” I said, naively) but Leviticus is just dragging on and on. And there is only so much poetry you can write in a 10-day period, but believe me, I could publish an extensive collection from the past week alone.

Tomorrow we do touristy things, like visit the limestone cliffs and the Inca baths, and Sunday we fly back to Lima. I will miss the dry climate, the sunburn, the visible stars, the cattle, the fresh juice smoothies, the guitar songs, the on-again-off-again creeping sadness and ennui, even the incessant horn beeping. But I’m still in Peru for another month.

Great clouds today, originally uploaded by pazonada.

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We had to hike to get to the village, originally uploaded by pazonada.

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We’ve been given Inca Cola,
Coca-Cola, strawberry yogurt.
Friendly stray dogs and incredibly old people
acknowledge us warmly on the street.
I realize now I love dry climates
and people in general.
And flowers. And vacas..
And displacement.

I really want to play dice, circa 2004 when N. taught me the game 10,000 during a long night in Brooklyn. (Let’s heave a collective sigh for things past and gone, shall we? 1, 2, 3: SIGH.)

We interviewed some rural internet owners today, after waking up at 5a and taking a taxi to a bus to a motorbike to another taxi to another bus to third taxi, many of which went speeding through the Andes. Here’s the surprise we got: the internet hasn’t worked for months in one place, and is problemmatic and oddly slow in the other place. The problem isn’t lack of adoption/need/acceptance within the community; conversely, there is such a high demand that as soon as cheaper, more reliable internet services open up in schools and cafes, these local business owners lose all their business, but still must pay a fee to the telecom, even when their internet connection is broken and no one comes to fix it, despite calls for service. Needless to say, we put a camera in front of some people and they complain a lot, assuming we’re from the company. Very frustrating/interesting/unexpected. Five more villages tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I still feel like I am in a life vortex. Like this is Life #2, and I don’t know what happened to Life #1. It’s not a bad thing; it just feels different. Sometimes, oddly, estrangement is comforting.