A Peruvian Horse Ranch: Mosquito bites, breaking backs, sweating, crying and singing

We arrived in the dark at Rancho Santana, our home for the next few weeks, to be greeted at the gate by Manuel, the owner of the farm. We exchanged simple Spanish greetings, and then lapsed into silence. We had traveled so far and wide it was so hard to even begin to think of some sort of Spanish conversation to start. Manuel didn’t seem to want to talk either and he escorted us to his Swiss wife Andrea who greeted us with enthusiasm and showed us to our bungalow which we would be sharing with a Finnish girl named Marta.

Marta was pretty and fun and willing to answer any question we could possibly ask about Finland as she was our first Finnish. We soon went to the little kitchen which was a freestanding room about 50 metres from our bungalow and had rice and lentils for dinner and were soon off to bed, exhausted after a million travels and happy to finally be in a nice bed in a place where we didn’t need to worry about money every day.

As all of our things had been drenched by Amazonial rain the first thing we needed to do the next day was wash our smelly clothes. Andrea, even though she talked a lot, didn’t always convey to us exactly what and how she wants things done, Marta showed us the ropes. She told us we could borrow some soap and hand wash everything in a basin. Andrea showed up home soon after taking Jocelyn to school and almost freaked out coz I was using special soap for the guests (albeit a little bit) and washing soap was not one of the things she was willing to share with volunteers. She then continued to talk for ages while I washed about all the terrible, lazy and weird hippie volunteers they had had and got me really scared for how she would feel about us as time went by, especially as there I was first thing, using her special washing soap.

 Anyway, the first week at the farm was quite nice, sleeping in a clean bungalow with a hot shower. By day we worked hard, mainly making beds for grass. As we were in the middle of the

desert the earth was almost as hard as rock and we had to dig this dirt up with a pick axe and shovel, chuck a lot of manure in and mix the soil and then plant some grass. We worked hard and well and what Andrea thought would take us two weeks took us four days and we were soon on to the next task of removing all the little trees and bushes from a huge field because they needed to plow it in a few weeks. This would have been fine had they given us a good tool to use but they gave us shovels which we were meant to hack with. It started out kind of fun but it became never ending as the field kept on stretching endlessly around. Some trees took a few slices with the shovel yet others took a lot more sweat and effort. It came to a head when, a few days later while walking on a medium sized thorn tree I scraped and yelled and huffed and puffed and sweated and screamed and finally threw my shovel down and burst into tears. It was too much.

The farm was dirt mainly besides the grass beds that had already been made and, it consisted of a few free standing buildings; our bungalow, the kitchen, a mud brick large room where Andrea, Manuel and their daughter Jocelyn slept and a mud house where the worker Jorge, his wife and their baby lived. Jorge and his wife were real traditional Peruvian people from the mountain, they lived immensely simply and their mud hut didn’t even have a covered floor and they lived on the dirt.  They cooked over a little fire outside their hut and normally just ate a lot of mielies and they spoke Qechua

 which is one of the native languages of Peru. The wife was really strange and dirty and so was her baby and she didn’t seem to do anything all day but wheel the baby around in her little wheelie cart and sometimes stand near where we were working and stare at us. Occasionally she would bark a stream of strange sounding Spanish at us which we could never understand. Interestingly enough she was 28 years old and her husband was 25 which are Roman and my own ages yet I couldn’t even begin to fathom the different worlds in which we separately inhabited. They even had their own toilet as there was a the nice outside one but this had been built by the family the previous year and previously everyone had used a long drop at the end of one of the fields. Andrea said that she hadn’t invited them to use the new toilet as they barely showered and didn’t wear underwear and apparently they never asked.

A week after we arrived, our time in the nice Bungalow was over. Marta was leaving and with her pretty blonde hair she had caught the eye of a local who wanted to buy a cow but instead kept phoning Andrea to ask if instead he could have her. Andrea had declined luckily and Marta left for Cusco and we moved into a tent because the farm had a guest staying for another 17 days. This was obviously something we were not looking forward to but it was made worse as the tent was placed on dirt and we knew that meant that it would be unavoidable to not have dirt in the tent as much as we tried. Not only this but getting up every night to go to the bathroom was hell as well as now our showers were outside in a field and could not happen past about 5pm because it was too cold after that. It was a big tent which you could stand up in yet now in the day time there was no place to escape the heat when we had a little break after lunch. It was not possible to spend time outside when you weren’t moving as there were too many mosquitoes and flies buzzing around (I was already drenched in bug spray every day) the kitchen was hot and bugs got in there anyway, and the tent was a furnace. We would kind of wonder around or sit in the tent sweating like soldiers yet it was better than being eaten by mosquitoes.

And then a few days after we moved into the tent things took another turn for the worse as the worker, his wife and the baby had all run away home under the pretense that his wife was just going home for a little while and he was escorting her half way. Andrea had told me that the wife was unhappy at the farm, mainly because there are no mosquitoes on the mountain, which I suppose I totally understand yet this meant that all the work that Jorge used to do was now our responsibility. Now one may think the work of one small Peruvian man with a bit of a limp would be easy for us strapping young people yet what his work mainly entailed was carrying pasto which is these long reeds they first cut and then feed the horses and the cows. And carrying pasto is no joke. At the end of the field Manuel would cut piles and piles of these long heavy reeds which were almost double my height and we would have

to hoist it onto our back or shoulders or behind our back, whichever way was possible, and drag it across the field and onto the farm where Manuel would grind it up with the LOUDEST machine in the world. Then we would have to give the food to horses. Now, maybe everyone does know this but horses eat a lot. They don’t just eat a lot, they eat a load and they don’t stop eating, they only stop eating occasionally to sleep a little but they wake in the night and eat some more. With 11 horses doing this eating thing constantly that is a lot of grass to carry across a field while mosquitoes swarm and attack your face, while your back aches and your shoulders are twisted weirdly around it and feel like they may fall off.

The tourist that arrived was a 50 something year old Austrian named Karin. She had her own host of stories to tell, about traveling in Africa and marrying an Ethiopian man 20 years younger and learning to make Chapatti. In face she loved to tell stories and didn’t really enjoy listening to stories but we enjoyed her and listened to all her opinions on all sorts of stuff and telling us when we (or more when I) was definitely wrong. Mostly she was fun and we had good times in the evening chatting and laughing, drinking beer and studying some Spanish. We didn’t have a dictionary and we wanted to study so we would use Jocelyn’s school books and Karin’s Spanish-German dictionary in a 3 language process but it worked and we collected new vocabulary daily.

The family was really poor,( probably poorer than most Peruvian’s Andrea said) and every Sole was thought about carefully, every new tool or thing that was needed was not bought but instead one simply made a plan and hoped it worked out. The family, ourselves and the Austrian were fed on something like 8 soles a day ($3 or R28) and everyday Andrea would buy food from the village and give it to a cook who would cook it all for 3soles (R10) and we would stroll to town pushing a (usually punctured) bicycle as it had a basket and the food was impossible to carry otherwise. 

In fact there were lots of cheap simple ways we thought about improving the farm, like a soap dish in the outside bathroom or more preparation minimizing trips to the village and perhaps a cart to carry the pasto, or carrying all the pasto in the morning so we didn’t have to do it twice day yet it was not our farm and helplessly we continued with the way things were.

The daughter, Jocelyn was 8 and spoilt. Considering her parents had no money she still had 50 barbies, expensive clothes and when she complained she got what she wanted. She didn’t seem to have any friends and expected her mother to play house and Barbie whenever she wanted to and even though her mother was busy she would always comply. Besides her somewhat spoiltness I loved her dearly and she was quite a spark of light at the farm and Roman and I would play with her or more often, pick her up from school (a 10 minute walk away) and I would do her homework with her when her mother was too busy. Teaching and especially tutoring is one of my favouritest things and when Jocelyn’s homework was my task, I was only too happy. When we had a moment and we weren’t exhausted we set up the slackline for ourselves and she would join. She didn’t speak much English but occasionally she would understand very well. In fact she was our best Spanish teacher we had. I would say “Jocelyn, che es?”  and she would give me the name and say it very slowly so I would hear her. When she wanted to convey something to us she would look at us directly the eyes and speak very slowly in Spanish and use all her body to explain what she was saying. I picked up so much just by her slow deliberate way of conveying things- in a way no adult seemed able to do.

Manuel, on the other hand, decided as we didn’t know much Spanish we would stop saying sentences to us and just mumbled a word like “Caballo!” (horse) or “soga” (rope). Now if we didn’t know a particular word then we were helpless for there was no sentence for context. However I kind of forgave Manuel for all of his unsociable behavior because of one thing. He had blue eyes. And not just any blue eyes, deep and  blue and piercing and it is the maddest thing seeing a Peruvian with these

 glowing eyes contrasting with his dark skin that, in a way, I excused anything else about him. Everyone called him ”gato” or cat as that is the name for anyone in Peru with coloured eyes and I think, in a way, perhaps everyone else forgave him of anything for the same reason.

And then there was Willy. Roman had bought a ten stringed instrument named a Charango in Lima and I had bought a pan pipe flute name a Sampona and when Andrea saw this she told the music man of the town that we liked music and he should come by. Willy showed up with his Charango and his Sampoἧa and proceeded to teach us traditional folklore music with songs like “Lejos de ti, voy a morir” (far from you I will die) and others of a similar nature. He was a great Charango player which involves a lot of fast tremolo strumming and Roman learnt a lot from him. The first few times Willy showed up in his little Tuk Tuk (motorbike-cart thing) with his long black hair and we began learning some songs Roman and he on the charango and me on the ukulele. Soon I decided to tackle Sampona and singing and it was really fun and we enjoyed his visits as we never knew when they would happen as he would always show up on a different day as to what he said. We were unperturbed by this after being in South America for some time but soon he decided he should show up every day and he also seemed to only want to play the same songs. After long draining days of pasto carrying, lunch and Jocelyn fetching, manure picking up, bush cutting, stick shoveling we were so tired and all we wanted to do was watch a quiet movie in the tent and there he would be expecting us to be constantly excited about repeating and repeating and repeating these songs….

And then sometime in our second week everyone watered their fields and the mosquitoes got excited and made babies and then the babies hatched. Before this happened, we thought there were mosquitoes and then there were MOSQUITOES. As we walked back to the tent at night we would feel a cloud moving against our bodies and now there really was nowhere to escape the heat and the bugs and our insect spray was depleted and they didn’t sell it in the village! 

 I think when one thinks about working on a horse farm they imagine horse riding every day and raking some manure yet sadly we only got to go riding once after much asking and pleading. There were these Inca pyramids which are a 5 hour return horse

ride which we really wanted to see and were promised that we would. Yet with Jorge gone and with them always wanting someone at the farm and many of the horses having various troubles it was apparently too much to have us go riding one day. To say that this upset me was a bit of an understatement and I suppose I felt after working every day for almost a month without complaining (out loud) we deserved some kind of special treat yet we didn’t really get it. I know that considering a lot of people pay to volunteer we should be grateful yet although we learned a lot I think in our last week we were counting down the minutes. Our Austrian told us that Andrea thought we were the best volunteers she’d ever had (which was not surprising with all her lazy volunteer stories) but I suppose I would have liked this sentiment to have been demonstrated with at least, one day of horse riding.

The last week passed by slowly and painfully, we couldn’t wait to leave, we were exhausted and Willy would show up just at that perfect time in the evening, where we were almost finished and I really needed a shower and a little rest. He showed up on our last day all of a sudden and asked us if we could give him money as he was starting a little band and they needed a drum. I was somewhat affronted by this yet unsure what to do.

We spoke to Andrea and she sighed and said “Tis is why I have no Peruvian friends, they see you as a gringo and they always, in the end, want something from you.” We had already promised him some money so we gave him a portion of the price, although I didn’t like the whole affair and although he promised a million times to come back that night, he didn’t and we never saw him again. To be honest, I was glad, I was so tired and now that I had a little bit of a new understanding as to what it means for a gringo to be friends with a Peruvian, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be part of it. 

 Yet I suppose now, a few weeks later as I look back on it, regardless of my complaining I remember sitting in the kitchen at night, eating dinner slowly and talking about everything there is in the world to talk about. Picking Jocelyn from school and pretending to be butterflies as we skipped home. All of us singing songs, Karin joining in with a shaker, Andrea with her guitar and Jocelyn

trying hardest to raise her little voice. The end of the day when I was so happy the day was done and now it was time to sit, guilt free as it was night time and we don’t work at night time. We would walk back to our tent, so afraid that the wooshing bats around us would fly into us. We would go inside the tent and listen to all the myriad of birds with their different bird calls going on all night and wake in the morning to hear different birds, the cow, the goat, the cock and a horses ninny- singing us a tremendous song of nature’s chorus.