Der Sonntagsmarkt, einer der größten des Landes.




Am Heimweg.

Am Strand von Panajachel.

Parque Centroamérica in Quetzaltenango (Xela).




Masqueraded people dancing on the streets of Almolonga on January 1st.

"In all the long, boring discussions about where the 'real Guatemala' is, you can be sure that the word Antigua has never come up. This is phantasyland - what the country would look like if the Scandinavians came in and took over for a couple of years. It's a place where power lines run underground, building codes are adhered to, rubbish is collected, traffic diverted and stray dogs 'disappear' mysteriously in the middle of the night,"
says the Lonely Planet. Couldn't be more true!



Volcán de Agua.




Chicken Busses! There is nothing like a ride on a crammed camioneta, an old American school bus, driven from the U.S. through Mexico to Guatemala by the proud owner himself. They are colorful, crammed, and fun. The front and side are adorned with the name of the driver's current girlfriend (Esmeralda!), and the inside is seasonly decorated with plastic fir branches, Christmas tree balls and lametta. Also important: a number of neon colored "Dios es mi guía" stickers in flaming biker-fonts. From tortillas-to-go to pens and vitamin pills, you can buy almost anything on a chicken bus ride. And, of course, there is the old Guatemalan joke: "How many people fit on a chicken bus?" - "Always one more!"






December 25th at the Parque Central. Three Santa Clauses!




One thing that is 'different' in Central America: Certain things are more likely to be broke than working.

When I stayed in Copán Ruinas, there was no electricity (have you ever had a shower in a candle lit dorm bathroom?). When I first stayed in Antigua, the telephone- and Internet connections of the whole city had broken down. In Quetzaltenango, there was no running water for two weeks. (There was, by the way, also a landslide we had to climb over on a mountain road. But that's a whole different story.) When I stayed in Guatemala City for the second time, there was (maybe because of the storm) no electricity in half of the city. Finally, on my second stop in Antigua, there was neither electricity nor water (maybe due to the small earthquake we experienced) for two days.
However, after a little getting used to, you don't really notice the no tap water or no electricity situation any more. After all, there are more important things to think about.




Nim Po'd handicraft market: Among other things, this is the place to buy your own statue of San Simón, a half catholic-half indigenous saint represented as a cigar smoking, mustached little fat man with sombrero. His image comes ready with an instruction manual and a set of candles for every occasion to burn in front of your new saint:
Rojas: Amor, fé y voluntad.
Amarillas: Protección para personas.
Verdes: Negocio y prosperidad.
Azules: Trabajo y suerte.
Rosadas: Salud y esperanzas.
Negras (that's an interesting one!): Contra enemigos y envidias.
Moradas: Contra los vicios y malos pensamientos.
Celestes: Dinero, felicidad, viajes y estudio.
Amarillas: Protección para personas adultas.
Blancas: Protección para los niños.

"La imagen de San Simón debe mantenerse en un rinconcito del dormitorio, de preferencia que sea en el piso, con un vaso de agua, su candelita roja, sus florecitas y además cuantas veces se pueda se le debe quemar incienso a las doce en punto del día, también cuando se pueda dar una limosna a cualquier persona necesitada, debe hacerce con toda la voluntad y siempre en nombre de este santo varon."

Miriam, my (not indigenous) Spanish teacher in Quetzaltenango, told me a hair-raising story about the effects of people "haciendo brujería" on each other in the name of San Simón. Her uncle used to have a relationship with a very young woman. When it did not work out and they broke up, she got together with a shaman from Zuníl. Having learned about indigenous believes from him, she went to see the mighty San Simón statue of Zuníl and burned a black candle, wishing Miriam's uncle bad luck in love for the rest of his life. Since then, not one of the love relationships he had over the years worked out...


Of course, you can also buy other things at the dimly lit market hall: woodoo-dolls and totem masks, colorful hairbands, used books, paintings and - worry dolls: A small, hand painted wooden box holds six tiny worry dolls. A Mayan legend says that if you are worried about something, you should tell it to a worry doll before going to bed at night, and then place the doll beneath your pillow. The next morning, the worry will be gone.




Café No Sé. A little café, cold, dark, candle-lit and comfortable, and decorated in the most random way you could possibly imagine. I like. I like a lot. Got me thinking of dropping out of university and opening a pub. ;)



Café No Sé.

Playing with the children at the Casa Guatemala orphanage (which can only be reached by boat!) the day before Christmas. Something to think about: Those kids are among the happiest children I have ever seen. Also, living at Casa Guatemala, they are certainly better off than many Guatemalan children who do have a family and live at home...





When the kids get hungry between mealtimes, they catch a fish from Rio Dulce and ask the cook to fry it up for them. With the river teeming with life, all they need is a hook tied to a string and a little patience.

Rio Dulce river is the only passway to the towns of Rio Dulce and Livingston, and its waters are used for swimming in and washing clothes. If you stay a night around Rio Dulce, you will probably also brush your teeth and shower with its water.




Two girls at a small indigenous village at Rio Dulce, consisting of about twelve jungle huts, a little store, and a village school. They live a way of life which has not changed much in the past decades. Many remote villages don't have electricity - but they don't lack it either. They grow crops and breed animals, and are ready and proud to share their rich culture with outsiders.

Scarlet Macaws!




At the Mayan ruins of Copán.

Those are four of the stories I wrote for my travel writing class last semester. Since no one is ever going to read them otherwise, I thought I'd put them online here. Writing them caused serious Fernweh again for Latin America. The Wellesley bubble seemed out of place sometimes, borderline ridiculous, so very upper-class and part of a capitalist make-believe system I don't agree with, worlds apart from what really matters, when thinking of Peru.

...
As you can see, I am in a very random communicative mood at the moment. Must have something to do with the snow and the poppy seed muffins. I came back to the U.S. a week ago, and I am happy to be here again: There are many things I really like about this place too. Something changed on one of those long bus rides through Mexico and put me into a communicative and patient people-and-candles-and-singing-along-with-Build-me-up-Butter-
cup-on-Youtube-mood again (I remember, this happened after my last trip too. Going away makes me more myself.) after being rather cranky over the last months. I even (yes, that happened on a bus in Mexico as well. Nothing compares to the enlightening effects of a bus ride.) stopped disliking my neighbor (which does not mean that I started liking her. But at least I stopped disliking her, which is a good start.)

It is nice to be back and knowing most of the people around me. It's nice to catch up on the holidays with friends and walk through the ville with Rain in the snow under my umbrella (yes, I have always had a thing for precipitation and only having one umbrella; I think interpersonal relationships would be much stronger and there would be less loneliness, less divorces and less abandoned kittens if people just went for a walk under single umbrellas more often), and to have all those incredibly sweet dining hall desserts again, and it is nice to see old what's-his-name who works in the Caz kitchen and always looks so happy when he sees me, and thinking about it, I really like the whole all girls school thing, and - it is just good to come home when it is snowing outside!

...
Will post some travel pictures later if the communicative mood lasts for some more hours!

Leaving the bus at Terminal Rodoviario, you step right into the bustling center of Valparaíso, finding yourself in a Chile that has little in common with its smog-drowning, gray capital: Valparaíso’s houses, resembling shoe boxes in bright orange, blue, red and yellow, are scattered over the steep hills like a three-dimensional canvas of eccentric paintings wrapped around a lively port. Valparaíso’s harbor and historical city center sits on a bay, facing the rolling waves of the Pacific and expanding onto its characteristic rolling residential hills. It is not only the harbor workers and the countless pigeons that let the city come to life – it is the city itself. The buildings and streets seem just as alive and proud of their turbulent history as their inhabitants: During the Spanish colonial time, Valparaíso suffered countless pirate attacks. Among others, Francis Drake stole a ship and plundered the houses when he came by Valparaíso on his circumnavigation of the world in 1578. Later, Valparaíso was hit by earthquakes several times. During the Spanish-South American war, the city was bombed and severely damaged by the Spanish Armada in 1866. In 1906, it was again struck by an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami. Finally, the Chilean military coup of 1973 started at the port of Valparaíso.

Even today, the past is vividly present in the city. Damaged buildings were not built up again and still shape its image, tangled wires dangle from roofs, and debris lines the streets. “Valparaíso,” writes Pablo Neruda, the Chilean literature Nobel Prize winner and most famous dweller of the city,

“qué disparate eres,
qué loco, puerto loco,
qué cabeza con cerro
desgreñada,
no acabas de peinarte,
nunca tuviste tiempo de vestirte,
siempre de sorprendió la vida.”

“Valparaíso,
how absurd you are,
how crazy, you crazy harbor,
what a head with hills,
disheveled,
you never comb yourself,
you have never had time to dress yourself,
life has always surprised you.”

Neruda was known for his restlessness and his politically motivated travels. In 1927, he took a honorary consulship in Rangoon (at that time a part of Burma, and a place he had never heard of before). In the following years, he worked in Ceylon, Java, and Singapore. From 1935 to 1936, he was the Chilean consul in Madrid and initiated anti-fascist movements. He lost his position as a consul because of his violations of the neutrality agreements. From 1939 to 1942, he held the position of general consul in Mexico. After his return to Chile, Neruda joined the communist party in 1945 and became a Chilean senator. His critique of the presidential politics forced him to fly to Paris, where he obtained a French passport with the help of Pablo Picasso. He returned to Chile in 1952 and won the Nobel prize for literature in 1971.

Valparaíso was one of the few places Neruda kept returning to throughout his life – maybe because the turbulent history of the city reminded him of his own restless life, and his eccentric mind found ease and inspiration in the bohemian charm of the city. “If I were religious,” declared Neruda, “I would say that Valparaíso is the greatest work of god.”
The best way to see Neruda’s Valparaíso is to take the city’s most famous means of transportation - the Ascensor Espíritu Santo, the “Holy Spirit Elevator” – up to his house on Bellavista Hill. All of the city’s hills are served by one of Valparaíso’s famous elevators. The ascensores were built in the trading heyday of the port during 1883 and 1916. In 1996, the World Monuments fund declared the cable cars “one of the world’s 100 most endangered historical treasures.” Look out of the rusty cabin and up the steep hill rising in front of you when enjoying the short, bumpy ride, and pray that those worn-out looking steel cables persevere just a little longer.
On top of Bellavista, you will be welcomed by the Museo a Cielo Abierto, an open air museum of mural art and maybe the inspiration for one of Neruda’s descriptions of the city:

“Entonces la pintura
llegó tambien lamiendo las paredes,
las vistió de celeste y de rosado
para que se pusieron a bailar.”

“And then – the paintings
came as well, rolled onto the walls,
they dressed them sky blue and rose red
to get them ready to dance.”

The project of the mural museum originated in 1969, when alumni of the art institute of the Universidad Católica painted the first murals. In the following years, the streets, walls and houses on Bellavista Hill gradually turned into the canvases of huge abstract paintings. Stroll by the works of famous Chilean artists such as Roberto Matta, José Balmes and Nemesio Antúnez, and pay attention to the little curiosities to be found on the side of the road: pirate flags blowing from chimneys, home drawn posters inviting random passers-by to private parties, and the curious objects the Valparaiseños get rid of on the street: you might not only find a plastic bottle, but a worn-out book or a stuffed animal sitting in the ditch waiting to be picked up as a special souvenir from Valparaíso.

From the Museo a Cielo Abierto, take Avenida Ramos and Avenida Ricardo Ferrari to get to La Sebastiana – Pablo Neruda’s house on Bellavista Hill. Neruda spotted the house, which had been abandoned while still under construction, during a visit to the city. He convinced to friends to buy it together with him, and baptized it “La Sebastiana” in honor of its architect, Sebastián Collado.

“Yo construí la casa.
La hice primero de aire.
Luego subí en el aire la bandera y la dejé colgada
del firmamento, [...]”

“I built the house.
First, I made it out of air.
Later, I hung a flag into the air, and left it hanging there
from the firmament,”

Today, La Sebastiana serves as a small museum of the poet’s life – it has been kept in its original condition - and as the setting for poetry workshops. Neruda’s part of La Sebastiana recreates the city’s bohemian charm on a smaller scale. Fitting into the overall colorfulness of the city, he painted it red and white. Inside La Sebastiana, maritime wall paintings and a bedroom furnished in the style of a ship cabin let the poet’s passion for the sea and for travel come to life. Neruda referred to himself as “el navegante de boca,” the “fake sailor:” in his heart of hearts, he preferred looking at the sea from land to sailing the ocean himself.

The poet loved round forms. He designed the dividing wall in his living room in the shape of a half circle, and the fireplace (which he baptized his “large earthen smoke jar”) in the shape of an egg. The most interesting piece of living room furniture is a pony-sized wooden horse Neruda brought from Paris. He wrote about the horse: “The man who does not play forever lost the child in him.”

You can further see Neruda’s wooden bar, where the poet used to mix Coquetelones – a cocktail he created himself consisting of Cognac, Cointreau, Champagne and orange juice. “The best thing about this drink,” the poet used to say, “is that the Champagne acts first, next the Cognac, and finally, the Cointreau reinforces the attack in order to keep the euphoria at its highest level. The orange juice is only useful as a distraction and camouflage.”

Watch out for the painting of Walt Whitman on the door to the balcony. He keenly admired Whitman’s poetry and referred to the American writer as his greatest influence. When asked by a carpenter whether the man on the picture was his father, Neruda answered: “Yes, he is my father... in poetry.” In a discussion with the Argentinean poet Jorge Luis Borges, the two writers came to the conclusion that nothing as great as Whitman’s verses could ever be written in Spanish. However, they found that it was too late for them to write their verse in English, and concluded that they had to make do with “second-rate” Spanish literature. However, Whitman’s presence in Neruda’s house raised his poetry to Whitmanesque verse forms and topics. Neruda imitated “his father’s” break with regular meter and addressed the grandiose and the minute with equal reverence as the American modernist.

Valparaíso with its colorful rough edges, the busy harbor, its hills, staircases and graffiti, the debris in the streets, made it the ideal place to live for an eccentric writer. Walking through the city today, you will experience what Pablo Neruda himself seemed to feel, some 50 years earlier:

“[...] la torre baila,
cantan las escaleras y las puertas, [...]
La casa crece y habla,
se sostiene en sus pies, [...]”

“The tower dances,
the stairs and the doors sing.
The house grows and talks,
it leans on its feet.”

But it is this, the haphazard optimism reflected in its colors, the disheveled character of the city, that make it the impressive place it is. Just as Pablo Neruda, you will be tempted to fall in love with the city and this air of life, adventure, and historical tidbits blowing through its history-shaken streets:

“[...] te pido, puerto mío,
que yo tengo derecho
a escribirte lo bueno y lo malvado
y soy como las lamparas amargas
cuando iluminan las botellas rotas.”

“I plead you, my harbor,
for the right
to write you the good and the bad,
for the right to be like the bitter ship lamps
that illuminate broken bottles.”

The desire to combine travel and work is of increasing popularity among adventuresome globetrotters. One way to do this is with a “TEFL” – “Teaching English as a Foreign Language” – certification: Four weeks of intense pedagogical and English language training plus $1,690 buy you the ticket for life-long employment all around the non-English speaking world. This sounded perfect for my dream to leave my Austrian homeland behind to live and work in South America.

I was travelling through the snowy Cordillera Blanca when I applied for the course, and therefore decided to get my TEFL certification somewhere hot and sunny. “TEFL International” has a school in the little town of Quepos, located in the province of Puntarenas on the Costa Rican Pacific coast. Quepos used to live off its banana shipping port, but now lives off tourism. Visitors, however, do not flock there to enjoy the limited charms of the small town, but to explore the nearby Manuel Antonio National Park. Only seven square kilometers in size, Manuel Antonio is the smallest of Costa Rica’s nature reserves, but its palm forests and the twelve small coastal islands are alive with more than 350 species of plants and over 100 species of animals, such as sloths, coatis, Capuchin monkeys and armadillos, crocodiles, and iguanas. All in all, I anticipated endless white beaches, a cloudless sky, monkey sights, and an excellent teaching education: The website promised, “We strive to be a fun, creative, responsive, culturally sensitive, high value company focusing on individual growth, customer satisfaction and helping the world communicate better by providing valuable experiences and skills for those in need and for those seeking to change and improve their lives.”
Soon, however, I found myself in the middle of an experience not necessarily worth its $1,690, but priceless all the same. Let me explain.

Four weeks after finding the acceptance letter in my mailbox, I stood in a heavy rain at the “Coca Cola bus terminal,” the transportation hub for most of the country, located in a run-down district of the Costa Rican capital San José. In my back pack was lots of beach wear, but no umbrella. I sought shelter from the rain in a roofed market and bought my bus ticket, but the aggressive stares of the venders drove me back into the rain. I suddenly had my first doubts about my decision to visit Costa Rica in the rainy (or, as the locals euphemistically call it, green) season. When reading about the Costa Rican climate in advance, I had not taken the existence of rain in a country of eternal sunshine serious. My bus came at last, and Ticos lined up at the front door. “Tico”, I later learned, is the term Costa Ricans use to refer to themselves. Costa Rica is the only Spanish speaking country using –tico as a diminutive suffix (as opposed Spain and other Latin America countries, where -ito is used). Costa Ricans would, then, say “chiquitico” rather than “chiquito” to refer to the smallness of something.

After the five hour bus ride and then another stroll through heavy rain, I dropped dead tired (but still optimistic) into a hostel bed in Quepos. The next morning the sun shone from a cloudless sky. I hurried to the beach and found it just as I had imagined with white sand and turquoise blue water. Coconut palms swayed their crowns in the ocean breeze. The few people on the beach, most of them Ticos, relaxed in the sun. I strolled along the beach road, taking in the smell of sun and salt and the screams of parrots. From a narrow brick wall separating the street from the beach, a darkly tanned guy with dreadlocks sold jewelry made of coconut wood and shells, pottery, and water pipes. One leg stretched out so his toes in dusty black flip flops just touched the ground, the other bent on the balustrade, he lifted a beer can to his mouth in slow motion as if posing for an “Imperial” commercial. He wore frazzled jeans shorts and a plaited ankle bracelet. I smiled at him and said, “¡Pura vida!” - “Pure life!” - the ubiquitous Costa Rican phrase reflecting the general “take it easy”-attitude of Costa Rica, which can be employed in almost every context.

“Pura vida!” he presented two rows of perfectly white teeth. “How do you like Costa Rica?”
“I only arrived yesterday,” I said, “The beach looks beautiful!”
“Are you here on vacation?” he lit a joint and looked up again, blowing a warm cloud of marijuana along my neck, “I’m Simon, by the way.”
I sat down next to him, and while we shared his joint, I told him that I was here for a month to take the TEFL course.
“Ah!” he laughed, “I know the guy who runs it. Jason. Have you met him?”
I shook my head, “What is he like?”
“He is new. They used to have another director, a woman - very professional. Jason is only here because he is gay.”
“He is here because he is gay?” I did not quite understand. Not yet, that is. Soon, I would learn that Jason did indeed devote more time on his love life than on running his school.
“It is easy to be gay here,” Simon shrugged, “Lots of gay guys in Quepos. Americans. We are very gay-friendly. We don’t care – leaves more beautiful girls for us,” he flashed me a deep glance from his brown Tico eyes. I laughed and gave him a pat on the back, then made my way towards the national park.
I took off my Havaianas and felt the sandy path under my feet, surrounded by lush vegetation and jungle sounds: the constant high, shrill tone of crickets and termites, and the cries of parrots. The air got hotter and more humid with every step I took, and the impenetrable wall of green leaves narrowed down the path more and more. Whole families of Capuchin monkeys swung through the trees around an abandoned picnic area, eying me suspiciously as I tried to get closer. The sloths were harder to make out: high up above the earth, I saw two of them slowly and gracefully moving through the treetops. I felt like the first human ever walked on this ground. Visiting Costa Rica during off-season, I decided, had been a good idea after all.

* * *

The next day, I could move into the house I had rented with four other TEFL students for the coming month. “Casa Mia” turned out to be a beautiful house: My room had a queen-size bed and a rustic bathroom tiled with natural stone. The big living room was furnished with countless paintings, plants, a couch and a satellite TV. There were hammocks in the kitchen. Since it never gets chilly in Costa Rica, none of the big windows had panes, which made the bright rooms look even brighter and friendlier.

I soon decided that TEFL students could be divided into three groups: party animals, sense seekers, and teachers. My house mates and I - Tanya from Britain, Joanne from Ireland, Zoe from Australia, and Lyla from New York – turned out to be the prototypes of those groups. Tanya, British, 19, and Zoe, 29, Australian farmer’s daughter and firewoman, represented the biggest group – the party animals. Party animals take TEFL courses in order to be able to live on permanent vacation. They want to be teachers at holiday destinations to earn the money they spend partying and are most likely to be spotted in marauding crowds at tourist hotspots.

Joanne had recently lost her job in an Irish bank and broken up with her boyfriend, which made her a representative of group number two: the sense-seekers. Sense-seekers travel to foreign countries in search of a new beginning. They want to leave their past behind and find a new sense in their lives. They can be seen at the tourist hotspots as well, but are easy to distinguish from the party-animals by their more intimate way of seeking consolation in each other, and their even heavier drinking habits.

Lyla and I, finally, represented the smallest group – those who had actually come here in order to teach English some day: “I want to open a hostel in Rio,” said Lyla, “until it goes really well, I’ll have to teach English on the side to support myself.” I wanted to live and teach in Peru, because I had visited and fallen in love with the place and its people, and also learned about the importance of education in a developing country.

This third group (which I will, to simplify matters, call the teachers) is harder to define. They study hard, make friends with the locals, try to improve their Spanish, and avoid all touristy places.

* * *

On Monday, the first day of school, it was pouring again. I still had not bought an umbrella. Busy cursing the weather, I filled a bowl with cornflakes and milk. When I lifted the spoon to my mouth, I looked at it and screamed: Hundreds of little brown bugs frolicked in my bowl. An essential lesson for living in Costa Rica: the only place safe from the insect invasion is inside the fridge. I packed the coffee powder between Lyla’s eggs, brushed my teeth, and took off to find some breakfast. Costa Rica was indeed an animal paradise as advertised.

Later that morning, I met my 16 fellow students the first time. Most of them were party-animals: They had come in order to party, tan and surf the waves of Pura Vida, not study. There also was a smaller group of sense-seekers, and some English teachers.
Jason, the new director of TEFL International’s Costa Rica office, herded us into a colorful chicken bus waiting for us in front of the TEFL school. Chicken buses, discarded American schoolbuses, are a common means of transport throughout Central America. Privately owned, they are colorfully decorated according to the driver’s taste. Ours was painted a cheerful red, yellow and green. The name “chicken buses” comes from the passengers using them to crisscross the country with various living animals, especially chickens. This particular chicken bus, however, belonged only to us TEFL students for the moment.

“¡Pura vida!” The corpulent driver smiled broadly under his red baseball cap. Our destination was “El Avion” - an ocean-view restaurant built around an airplane. From the outside, the bizarre building looked as if it had simply been designed that way because the plane had been sitting there, and the architects had not bothered to move it.
“How did you get that airplane into your restaurant?” I asked the owner as we all loaded our plates with the fruits and cakes of the welcome buffet. He told me that the Fairchild C-123 had played an important role in the infamous Iran-Contra Affair: In the 1980’s, the Reagan administration started selling arms to Iran in order to win the release of US citizens held hostage in Lebanon and to fund the “Contras,” Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary guerilla fighters. With the help of the CIA, the Contras purchased, among other things, two C-123 cargo planes and also built a secret airstrip on an American-owned ranch in Costa Rica. The twin sister of the Avion’s airplane was shot down over Nicaragua in 1986. CIA agent Eugene Hasenfus parachuted into safety, but was captured by Nicaraguan authorities. In a press conference on Nicaraguan soil, he made the scandal public. When the Iranian government confirmed his story, Reagan was forced to admit that there had been weapon sales to Iran in order to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. As a result, the operation was suspended, and the second Fairchild plane abandoned at the airport in San José.

“In 2002,” the owner of ‘El Avion’ explained proudly, “I purchased the Fairchild for $3,000.” Seeing his chance to create a different kind of tourist attraction, he disassembled the plane, shipped the pieces to Quepos, reassembled them and opened his restaurant.
Over breakfast under the wings of the airplane, Jason welcomed us to the country of ¡Pura Vida! and the TEFL course. He had rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt and accented some strands of hair with styling gel. I studied the movements of his buttocks under the tight black jeans as he was walking up and down, dwelling upon the beauty of the Costa Rican beaches and assuring that he would always be there for us if we had any questions about the course.

“It’s too bad that he is gay,” commented Lyla, who was sitting next to me.
I grinned. Over the next four weeks, I came to know Lyla as someone you constantly had to keep from buying puppies at street corners. Shamelessly making use of her good looks and smoky Janis Joplin voice, she usually got what she wanted from friends and enemies alike; I was positive that she would have this hostel in Rio some day.
I promised the owner of the “Avion” to come back soon and try the cocktails he claimed to be famous for, and boarded our chicken bus again to return to the TEFL school.

“Pura vida!” a darkly tanned American with black curls flowing down her back welcomed us to the TEFL classroom. “I’m Gina, I’m going to be your teacher during the first week!” She handed out our schedules. The first week of class introduced us to different second language acquisition theories and to the first rule of the TEFL approach: Speaking Spanish in the classroom was a no-no.

“It’s easiest if you don’t let them find out if you speak Spanish,” said Gina. The rule: Grammar points had to be imbedded in games and assignments, but must not be explained: “We want second language acquisition to be as close to first language acquisition as possible. Just as children learn a new language by using it, we want our students to develop a feeling for grammatical structures without being aware of it. It’s a way of teaching that lowers the “affective filter” – a mechanism triggered by stress. When you’re in the classroom in two weeks, never forget that you want to make them speak without being aware that they are learning grammar.”

I did not quite agree, “Why not simplify matters and spend five minutes explaining the grammatical gist of the second language by means of the first?” The answer to this question was, as I finally figured out, fairly simple: The TEFL method relieves its teachers of the inconvenience of studying the grammar themselves.

The party-animals yawned. Cody, a skinheaded sense-seeker who had just given up his carpentry job in Afghanistan, showed Joanne, a fellow sense-seeker, pictures of himself posing on the back of a camel with a machine gun. Nobody but the few “teachers” payed attention to Gina.

It kept raining almost 24 hours a day, and so, the first few schooldays passed by peacefully. Even the party-animals preferred the dry and air-conditioned classroom to any other place. Lyla and I spent the evenings studying on the hammocks in the backyard of Casa Mia or with Simon, who I had met again on the beach, and his friends. Our housemates rolled their eyes: “Just don’t bring those people here!”

While “teachers” visit foreign countries in order to get to know their people, their mentality, and their difference, party-animals and sense-seekers never fully leave their home country behind. They want to see the same kind of people and places they would see at home, and avoid anything unknown. Especially party-animal Zoe seemed to consider every Tico a uncivilized savage eager to kidnap, rob and rape her. She and Tanya spent the nights partying with fellow tourists and had troubles keeping their eyes open in the classroom the next day. Joanne had stopped leaving the house in her spare time altogether. She used to wait for Cody to show up and disappear with him in her room for hours in order to do “homework.”

The end of that week caused some excitement: Leo from Britain, in his thirties and the oldest of the party animals, came late for class. Gina turned to scold him as he came through the door, but then broke off. Leo’s face was as white as a sheet.

He limped to his place, “I got hit by a car last night.”
“YOU GOT HIT BY A CAR?”
“I was walking home from a bar ... I remember that I saw the car, but that’s it. I woke up in the ditch, all wet, and ... well. That’s all I remember.”
He tried to sit down, but had to get up again. The car had hit him in the back and sitting caused him unbearable pain.
“Did you go to the doctor?” someone asked.
“No, but to the pharmacy. I’m fine,” he showed us a half-empty box of painkillers, pushed back his chair but remained standing in front of it, and placed his notebook on the table. He definitely did not look as if he were fine. Gina just turned back to the board without a comment.

“The concept of total physical response is another important part of the TEFL method,” she continued, “It goes back to James Asher. He found that children respond to verbal stimulations physically before they produce their own utterances. Just as in children, listening, taught through the physical execution of commands, is the key that unlocks speaking skills in second language acquisition...”

After snacking on his painkillers for two hours, Leo left during a break. He refused to see a doctor, but promised to lie down for an hour.

In the cities, Ticos tend to be rather careful drivers. On country roads, on the other hand, there are no streetlights, no sidewalks, and, apparently, no laws. Drivers go as fast as they like, which leads to a high number of dead monkeys (and TEFL students?) every month and is part of the reason the endangered population of the “mono titi,” the squirrel monkey, stays low despite breeding programs. Leo’s drunken stumbling down a country road after midnight had, as it turned out, not been the best idea.

Leo did not come back the next day. His housemates told us that he had gone to the hospital after all – a scrape on his arm had become inflamed to a degree that he could not bend his elbow any more.

On Friday, Lyla and I walked back through the merely drizzling rain to Casa Mia, expecting a calm end to an exciting week. But Susanna, the landlady, awaited us in the living room. She explained that she did not know what to do – she had not seen one Colón of the rent we had already paid on our first day at TEFL. The check Jason had given Susanna bounced. Money traveling through Jason’s hands took a suspiciously long time to reach its final destination. At the same time, his private bank account never seemed to run out of ample funds. He drove a Mercedes, wore designer clothes and, according to the party animals, frequently dined at fancy tourist restaurants. Not only had he not paid Susanna – when she told us how much Jason owed her, it turned out that he had charged each of us $50 more than he would pay Susanna. Given he did that every month, he made $250 untaxed extra money a month alone from the five students living at Casa Mia.

“He is my friend!” Susanna bristled with anger. “Or I thought he was! In Costa Rica, you can try to cash in a check three times,” she explained, “if it is not covered the third time, the bank can, if a substantial amount of money is involved, get the person who wrote the check in big trouble. They can take away his goods.” She shook her head, “It already bounced two times. I don’t want to get Jason into trouble. But we need the money!” The maid, Maria, had been watching us in silence. “Necesito mi sueldo!” she affirmed, “Tengo que ir a la casa de mi madre, tengo que ir a Argentina, y no puedo comprar mi billete!” – “I need my money! I have to fly to Argentina to see my mother, and I can not buy the ticket because I have not been paid!”

Susanna could not pay Maria before she had been paid by Jason. Lyla and I promised that we would talk to him. “Thank you, thank you so much!” she almost hugged us, “it is harder for me to speak with the people at TEFL because my English is not good.”
Lyla and I went back to the school, enraged and determined to help Susan and Maria. Jason, of course, was nowhere to be found. He was more likely to be seen driving along the road between Quepos and Manuel Antonio in his open Mercedes than in his office. We flounced into the office of his Tico assistant, Omar, without knocking. I discovered that he was the sanest member of the organization. Apart from his soft spot for blond haired, blue eyed “Gringas,” he stayed calm in every situation and pulled the strings behind the scenes, compensating for Jason’s carelessness.

“Dinero!” Lyla towered over his desk, and he shrunk to half of his size. “Money!” she rumbled, “How can you not pay Susan? Una banda de ladrones, that’s what you are! A bunch of thieves!” She shook her peroxide blonde curls in disdain, her blue eyes shooting angry sparks with every flutter of her long eyelashes. Omar gasped, defenseless. I, then, leaned on the desk and explained the problem and what we thought had to be done as a solution: “Maria really needs to go to Argentina. Don’t you think it is important to resolve this situation as soon as possible? It would be awesome if you could help us to find Jason...”

Omar seemed to realize that our wishes were actually his wishes too. “Moren,” he said, “moren.” (He claimed to speak an indigenous Costa Rican language in which “moren,” a word he loved to throw into English conversations, meant “okay.”)
“I will see what I can do,” he nodded his head eagerly. We had already drawn him onto our side of the mission for justice. “Thank you!” we left the office in a mood far better than we had entered it with, “¡Pura vida!”

Omar actually reached Jason and found a way to get the money into the institute’s bank account. That same night, he came by Casa Mia, apologized for the inconvenience and assured Susanna that there would not be any more problems with cashing in the check. “¡Pura vida!” he waved at Lyla and me, and we waved back, sitting in the hammocks at the patio writing lesson plans and sipping the Caipirinhas, cocktails made of Cachaça (Brazilian rum), sugar and lime. A few days later, we received a check to cover the $50 we had been charged “by mistake.”

Our syllabus for the second week (which began just as rainy as the first) said “linguistics and phonology,” and was taught by Karen; a woman in her late forties who, as it turned out, knew precious little about grammatical terms and phonological symbols. Karen is the most exotic miscast you will encounter when taking TEFL International’s Costa Rica course. The first thing that struck me about her was her outfit, a chaos of colors and plastic jewelry that looked as if it had been chosen by a four year old let loose on a costume rental: She wore a shapeless striped T-shirt in different shades of red and orange and a skirt that somehow seemed too short for both her age and the occasion. Every movement of her arms was accompanied by the jingling of her bracelets.
Lyla stared at Karen and burst her chewing gum bubble with an audible “plop.”
“Come on!” she said to me, not bothering to lower her voice, “Does she seriously expect us to respect her like that? And we have to follow a dress code!” Indeed, the “professional dress code” (“Students are asked to look neat and dress in appropriate attire while they teach and represent TEFL International. Skirts should be knee length or longer. ...”) did not seem to apply for our instructors. At first, I could not help but feel a strange affection for Karen’s eccentricities. Maybe she was an artist, trying to convey a message with her outfit, although I started to have doubts about her seriousness as a teacher when she talked about the International Phonetic Alphabet. Her transcriptions on the board did not bother with long vowels. She also did not acknowledge the existence of the symbol / æ / (as, for instance, the “a” in “bat”). For her, any “a” sound was either / ə / (as in about) or “e” (as in “they”), two symbols she freely distributed among her example words. The class of TEFL students looked confused.

“I know, it looks hard,” Karen said, jingling her bracelets apologetically, “It can not really be explained. It’s something you have to develop a feeling for. You learn how to do it by doing it.”

When Karen told us the next day that the difference between an adjective and an adverb was a matter of interpretation, my sympathy disappeared in one fell swoop.
Little did I know that I would soon have an opportunity to get to know her outside the classroom. A little soda – a small tavern serving huge helpings of traditional Costa Rican food, which was mainly visited by locals – had become one of my favorite places. “Soda Sanchez” is located only a 15 minute walk from the TEFL school, which made me a lunch break regular.

“Pura Vida!” I was greeted by their only waitress, who already knew me.
“Pura Vida!” I greeted back and sat down at one of the few free places in the small, open room – next to Karen.

“How are you?” she asked, her mouth full of beans.
“Oh, I’m good! It’s not raining for a change!” I laughed.
The waitress placed a plate of fragrant casado de pollo, a traditional Costa Rican lunch of rice, black beans, chicken, vegetables and half of a fried plantain, in front of me. The name of the dish, casado, originates from the Spanish word for “married”: customers in a restaurant would say that they wanted to be treated like a casado – a married man, referring to the dish a married Tico would traditionally get for lunch.

“How did you come to work in Costa Rica?” I speared a slice of zucchini on my fork. Studying the TEFL world and its inhabitants had become one of my favorite pastimes. It was at least as thrilling as watching Capuchin monkeys in the national park.
“I taught at a women’s school in Oman last year. But I didn’t like the job very much. I don’t speak Arabic, and hardly anyone there spoke English...” With the point of her knife, she moved the beans and the rice two the opposite rims of her plate, “So I left. This is only my second month here. What I really want to do is teach children... but this is the job I found.”

It dawned on me that Karen was a sense-seeker as well. She was what poor Joanne would eventually turn into!

“You can always change your job,” I shrugged, “if something you like better comes up.”
“I’m on a six month contract with Jason. It’s not an easy job at all. Some of your peers are hard to work with... and the TEFL staff isn’t particularly easy to get along with either.” She probably thought about Karen, who openly condescended to her lack of professionalism, and paid as little attention to her words as the party-animals and sense-seekers did.

I motioned for the check, and did not really know what to say to Karen, who looked sad. Then she looked up, and seemed to regret that she had started the topic at all. Maybe it dawned on her that complaining about your job in front of a student might not be the best idea.

I pointed to the gray sky, “Looks like it’s going to rain again.” Karen sighed a yes, and we left for the TEFL school.

* * *

After another week of wetness, even one of the “teachers,” Lyla, had to get out. She decided to visit Malpais, a little hippie town and surfer’s paradise that could only be reached by a water taxi and a drive of several hours over a dirt road. Someone had told her that Malpais was the new celebrity hotspot of Costa Rica and supposedly going to be visited by Vince Vaughn that very weekend. Lyla would have swum and carried her surfboard down the dirt road on bare feet in order to roast her skin in the same sun as Vince Vaughn.

While my friend was chasing celebrities, I spent a calm and only partly rainy weekend on the beach. Using Simon’s back as a pillow, I watched the few swimmers and surfers. “Look!” I pointed to Anthony, one of my fellow students. He had been left by his boyfriend after a year long relationship, which made him one of the sense-seekers. I kept Simon up to date on the happenings at TEFL. He was a key figure in spreading town gossip and always wanted to be well informed. He presumably picks one or two of the “teachers” out of every TEFL course in order to secure uncomplicated flirts and a reliable source of information.

Simon nodded, “I told you. Lots of gay Americans in Quepos.”

* * *

The rains started again just in time for our first day of teaching practice. In collaboration with Quepos’ Catholic church, TEFL International offers free English courses for the locals. The fact that Costa Rica is the most visited nation of Central America is reflected in its tourism industry, which makes $ 1,7 billion a year – an impressive figure for a country as small as 51,100 square kilometers. Due to the rise of tourism, a decently paid job in Costa Rica requires at least some basic English. Many young adults and open-minded members of the older generations embrace the presence of the TEFL organization in Quepos and its free English courses as a ticket to possible future careers, and parents are happy to send their children to additional free English lessons.
Since both Lyla and I had to teach early afternoon classes on Monday, I knocked on her door at noon. No one answered, and I wondered whether she had already left without telling me. It did not seem likely; normally she was the one to be late to class. I did not have time to solve that mystery but instead got ready to teach my first English lesson in Costa Rica.

It was a small class of adult beginners. Four men and a woman looked at me expectantly as I entered the classroom. I started off with a repetition of what they already knew: I had everybody introduce themselves, and then played “hangman” on the board to open the new topic with the key words. The TEFL approach believes in first building self confidence through reinforcement of a concept that is already known, and then moving on to new ground. This particular day, we were going to talk about places and giving directions. I asked for a volunteer who closed his eyes and was then directed through the classroom by the others, ending with all of us laughing. Eager to answer my questions, they seemed to have a good time and left the classroom with a little more English than before. I had to keep myself from singing out loud when the lesson was over. It was good that I had come to TEFL after all! Teaching in this part of the world was really what I wanted to do.

Leaving the classroom, I bumped into a frenzied Lyla. She too had just left her classroom. “Where have you been?” I asked, “I...”
Lyla pushed me into the direction of the exit, “Let’s go, let’s just go.”
I followed her, “Moren, moren. What happened?” Walking up the hill to Casa Mia, she told me about her weekend. On her way back from Malpais (where she had not met Vince Vaughn, but at least taken a picture of the hotel he was said to be staying at), the bus had broken down on the dirt road. By the time they reached the coast on an ersatz bus hours later, the water taxi had already left and she had to wait for the next one. She had jumped off the bus and gone straight into her teaching praxis – without having any materials prepared or remembering the lesson plan very well. She had come up with an improvised lesson, which had ended with the students building a sentence with one of the new adjectives she had taught them: “The teacher is crazy.”
I grinned, “At least it shows that they have learned something.”
Karen, functioning as “professional observer,” however, had not taken Lyla’s performance in good humor. In revenge for Lyla’s barely hidden disrespect in the classroom the week before, she had chosen her for a personal enemy and not only criticized her on a professional, but also on a personal level.
“She said it was the worst teaching she has ever seen,” said Lyla, “and that she’s going to observe all my other lessons.”
The “professional feedback forms” filled in by an observer were a crucial part of the portfolio we had to hand in at the end of the course. A series of bad feedbacks meant that Jason, who would assess the portfolios, could fail a student.
Trying to get Lyla to calm down, I shrugged, “It only means that you will have to prepare your other lessons twice as hard, then you’ll be fine. I mean, she can’t give you bad feedback on good teaching. And this time really was your own fault.”
Lyla sighed and looked doubtful.

* * *

Huddling together under an absurdly small, yellow children’s umbrella, Lyla and I made our way down from Casa Mia to the Catholic church. Our task was to team-teach a lesson that embedded the use of adverbs of frequency into the theme and vocabulary of food to a group of over twenty children between the age of eight and twelve. We were well prepared: We had made a colorful poster depicting a “thermometer of frequency,” practiced the “breakfast song” we were planning to teach them, and bought a basket full of fresh fruit we wanted to cut up for the children to eat and practice their vocabulary with.
“If I had known it was going to rain like this every day,” Lyla said, throwing a reproachful gaze at her cigarette which the rain had extinguished, “I would never have come here.” We were soaked through, though we had not even made it half the way down the hill towards the church. Rain in Costa Rica has the nasty habit of coming from all directions at the same time, rendering umbrellas useless. It also seems to swallow taxis: under normal circumstances, they can be flagged down even at the remotest corner of the small town, but they all disappear the moment you need them in order to stay dry. “Great,” I said and tried, again, to stop a random car, “we won’t only be wet, we will also be late.”
We were lucky this time: a beige Jeep pulled up at the side of the road, and the driver, a young American, invited us in and asked where we wanted to go.

“To the church,” I explained, hopping into the passenger seat, “thank you so much!” Lyla asked whether he was living in Costa Rica, since he had his own car.
“Yeah,” he said, “My wife and I are doing real estate.” Moving to the sunny coasts and buying real estate to rent out to tourists is of increasing popularity among well-off “gringos.”

In front of the church, our rescuer dismissed us into the rain with a “¡Pura vida!”
Lyla grouchily opened our umbrella for the last few steps to the church.
“That is what I should do!” she said, jerking to a stop.
“You should drive a Jeep?”
“No,” she jostled me from under the useless umbrella out into the rain and laughed, “I should do real estate! In New York, where it doesn’t rain all the time.”
“What about the hostel in Rio you wanted to open?” I inquired.
“That’s what I’m going to finance with the money I make doing real estate, of course.” This was probably not the worst of her ideas. I found it easier to picture her in high-heels selling apartments than as an English teacher.
We arrived at the classroom just in time. Omar handed us the name tags for the kids and an attendance list. Lyla fluttered her eyelashes for him, and he blushed. Giggling, we entered the classroom and took attendance. We knew that the fruits we had brought were going to outshine everyone else’s lesson. Those children were destined to love us.
Our enthusiasm was damped right away: Karen waited in a corner of the classroom looking like a vulture patiently circling over the lonely desert wanderer it plans to have for dinner.

“Chrissi!” she cawed, “What are you doing here?”
As usual, she had dressed like a parrot rather than a teacher (or a vulture): She wore a rainbow colored t-shirt, several pink-and-yellow plastic pearl bracelets, and a pair of huge plastic earrings.
“I’m team-teaching a lesson with Lyla,” I explained calmly, while Lyla was sticking our posters to the board.
“You can’t team-teach with her,” Karen snapped back, “You’re not on the list for today. You already had your team lesson, I know that you can teach. I want to see her.” Karen had formed a habit of never referring to Lyla by her name.
I was still smiling, “But she does not have a partner. She was supposed to teach with Leo. Leo got hit by a car last week, as you might remember. This class is always team-taught, because they are children, and so many. That’s why I’m here. I’m just filling in for Leo. Simply pretend that I’m not here. Or imagine me as Leo, if you want.”
Karen tapped her pen against the “professional observer’s feedback form” she was about to fill in, then looked up. I returned the look in silence waiting for the moment she would remember the conversation we had had a few days ago at Soda Sanchez. She certainly did not want me to tell everyone that she disliked her job and the whole organization? There it was – her pupils shrank for a split second. “Well then,” I said, “I guess we’d better get started!”

The kids were great. They loved the games we had invented for them and the “breakfast song:” “What do you like for breakfast? – Orange juice and toast! What do –“
All of a sudden, it went dark. Pitch dark. The children laughed. They were used to power outages, another frequent side effect of Costa Rica’s rainy season.
“Let’s keep on singing!” I encouraged them, “You will see, it’s going to be even more fun in the dark!” We could not see a thing. Lyla was standing in the middle of the classroom, motionless. From another power outage at Casa Mia a few days before, I knew that darkness made her panic. I touched her arm, “Are you okay?”

The children enthusiastically sang our song into the dark room; the vulture waited in her corner for us to make a mistake, getting ready to swoop down on her prey. “No!” Lyla whispered back, and I could feel that she was shaking. The light went back on as suddenly as it had gone out. We looked at each other, then went on teaching as if nothing had happened. We cut up the apples, bananas and oranges, and made the children choose by answering the question a last time: “What do you normally have for breakfast? What do you sometimes have for lunch?”

The kids loved the fruit. After the lesson, a boy in overalls came over, gave one of his crayons to each of us and asked whether he could have our poster with the different fruits. All smiles, we folded it up for him. There was nothing Karen could have disliked about the lesson.

“Lyla!” she cawed, “I think we’ve already had more than enough arguments this week. Here’s your feedback sheet. You can read it on your own.” She flung the feedback form at her and rushed out of the room. Under normal circumstances, Karen would discuss what she had written with the teacher right after the lesson. She made no secret of her dislike of Lyla. Lyla looked at the form. Obviously, there was a lot Karen had to complain about. Lyla just could not please her, no matter how hard she tried. She shoved the sheet into her bag, and we left in silence, turning off the light, and stepping out into the rain.

Sitting on the floor of Casa Mia’s living room later in the evening, we drew posters for Lyla’s next lesson. TEFL International’s policy said that we had to get our lesson plans signed by an instructor by noon the day before we taught. After having them approved before the deadline, we had the afternoon and next morning to draw posters, write flashcards and make props we needed for our classes. Lyla, however, got special treatment. Unless she presented all her materials right with her lesson plan, Karen would refuse to sign it. Missing the deadline for the signature meant getting no signature at all, and several disapproved lesson plans meant that Jason would have a reason to fail her.
“I’m never going to get done with this,” Lyla got up and sat down on one of the hammocks on the patio, facing the dark garden. I kept on coloring her drawings: she was supposed to teach jobs and workplaces. We already had a taxi driver, a tour guide, a teacher, a doctor, and a waiter. Depending on which country you take the TEFL course in, you are taught how to apply your lessons to the respective cultural and educational background. Language schools in Costa Rica – our possible future work places – often provide only one textbook for the teacher. The teacher, then, has to follow the book, without the students holding copies of it. Furthermore, we had to adapt the topics presented in the American or British textbooks to vocabulary and themes relevant for a Costa Rican audience, such as using job examples they would encounter in their everyday life instead of the lawyers and nurses the textbook suggested. Since it could not be taken for granted that there was a board in a Costa Rican classroom either, we were taught to work with posters. At the end of the course, we were supposed to know how to teach a good lesson even if a school provided no resources for the students, lacked classroom equipment, and the students neither had books to write in nor anything to write with.
Lyla flicked her cigarette stub into the trees and came back in.

“Look at my waiter,” I raised the picture, “Isn’t he – “ I broke up.
Her eyes were red, “I am leaving, Chrissi. I am going to quit.”
“No you are not!”
“Yes I am. Karen is going to fail me anyway.”
“But you paid $1,690 for this course! You won’t get back a cent of that if you quit now! It’s only one more week. One week! That’s nothing! And what about the hotel in Rio? You will have to teach English first while you are there, to help support yourself until it gets mentioned in Lonely Planet!”
She shrugged, “She will fail me. I can not look at her and hear her telling me that I failed. I just can’t. She won’t have that last triumph.”
“But that’s like you’re running away! That’s like, giving her this moment of triumph right now, without even trying!”
“I don’t care. Fuck it.”
“It’s only one more week, for God’s sake! Karen can’t fail you – everyone knows that you are doing a good job! You were late one time – so what. That happens. We are in Costa Rica. That’s where everyone is late! You are going to get this certificate. We are going to smoke some of Simon’s weed now, if that makes you feel better, and then we are finishing these drawings!” I was not going to lose the single person I got along with.
Lyla kneeled down next to me on the floor and looked at the waiter I had drawn. “He is cute. Looks a bit like Simon.”
“That’s who I had in mind! Pretty good, isn’t it?”
She picked up the pink crayon the little boy had given us the day before, “Let’s give the teacher a touch of Karen!”

The last week of teaching went by fast. We worked hard planning lessons, making teaching materials, and writing essays for our final portfolios. After having witnessed Karen’s refusal to sign a well-elaborated lesson plan Lyla had done because she “did not like the activities,” Omar asked her for a word in private. He closed the door behind the two of them for what seemed to be a long time. Coming out, he nodded at Lyla: “Todo moren. Don’t worry.” Karen did not cause any more trouble. Lyla blinked at him thankfully, and did not snigger at his blushing this time.

* * *

We should receive our certificates during a big farewell dinner. Sitting on a long, candle lit table, everyone was dressed up and taking pictures. Despite everything, I felt solemn and nostalgic. No more Simon on the beach. No more teaching practice at the church. No more falling asleep in a hammock.

Next to me, Lyla was getting nervous, “I really don’t know what I’m going to do if she fails me.”
“She won’t fail you. Omar would kill her.”
“I hope so.”
Omar and Gina were sitting at one end of the table. Neither Karen nor Jason were here yet. We had not seen Jason since the money conflict with Susanna. But Karen... I spent a minute deliberating about the chances that Omar had actually murdered her for failing Lyla, then abandoned the theory as rather unlikely.

Omar got up from his seat and cleared his throat, “Unfortunately, Jason will not be able to join us tonight. He unexpectedly had to fly to the States last weekend. An urgent family affair.” He did not waste a word on Karen. He gave a short speech, about how nice it had been to get to know all of us, and that now, finally, we could call ourselves teachers. One after the other, we got up and received our certificate under cheers from our fellow students. Lyla smiled broadly. She got one too.

I turned the document around in my hands. A $1,690 sheet of paper. The back said, in twelve different languages: “The TEFL International TESOL Certificate course is a four-week intensive course that includes approximately 120 hours of study and at least 6 hours of Observed Teaching Practice. It meets or exceeds all international standards for Initial Teacher Training.” I thought of Thailand. Rumor has it that there, you can buy the same certificate for $20.

* * *

Six months later, I am looking at my certificate again, asking myself whether it is worth its price and effort. The answer is yes and no. It was worth the experience, but not the money. But, most importantly: six more months from now, I will be back in South America, and thanks to this sheet of paper easily find a job.

If you are toying with the thought to do the same, however, I would advise you to get a nice $20 copy of the certificate in Thailand instead, and spend the remaining $1,670 on traveling Asia.

The quality of Peruvian elementary school education was ranked last of 131 countries in the November 2007 survey of the World Economic Forum. The same week, Peru's Minister of Education, José Antonio Chang, announced the distribution of 40,000 laptops to elementary school children in the poorest and most rural regions of Peru. Douglas and Ale Beale, a Peruvian-American couple I know via their contributions to the discussion forum on livinginperu.com, do research on primary education in Peru. Asked for their opinion on the contradicting news, Douglas wrote: “[G]overnment spending in Peru is [...] high profile. Brightly colored computers make good news. The Minister of Education is giving laptops to the poorest children in the country; the ones who probably don’t have electricity, and are lacking the money to buy pencils and paper. Will it help? My first thought was that they could sell them to buy food. The public schools really need qualified teachers, new facilities, and supplies for the teachers and students.”

I thought back to my time in Peru.

~ ~ ~

“¡Plátanos! ¡Plátanos! ¡Manzaaanas!... ¡Plátanos! ¡Plátanos! ¡Manzaaanas! ...” “Bananas! Bananas! Apples!”

I stared at the three digital numbers glowing red in the dark. 6.30 am. Again. No sleeping in for me. “¡Plátanos! ¡Plátanos! ¡Manzaaanas!” I crawled out from under my three layers of alpaca wool blankets and shivered into a draft of icy air coming from the window. I took a quick, cold shower and got dressed, eager for a mug of hot coca leaf tea before leaving for Aldea Yanapay, the school I volunteered at in Cusco.

Aldea Yanapay means “village of help” – aldea being Spanish for village, and yanapay Quechua, an indigenous Peruvian language, for “help.” The first time I heard of the owner and founder of Yanapay, Yuri, was on my first day of work at his school. Heidy, the co-director of a language school in Cusco who also places volunteers, took me for hot chocolate to Yuri’s cafe, which helps to finance the school. Heidy talked about Yuri for the entire taxi ride. The two of them had studied together in Lima. Back then, she laughed, no one would have thought that he would be running a social project only a few years later. Everyone had expected him to move abroad and become a successful banker. “He always wore a suit in business school,” Heidy shook her head, “then, after graduation, he all of a sudden exchanged it for an alpaca sweater and founded the Yanapay cafe and the school in Cusco!”

Our taxi stopped at Calle las Ruinas in Cusco, and Heidy paid our 3 Soles (1 US $) fare. Hidden inside a narrow entrance was a wooden, spiral staircase that led us up to the second floor. The walls of the staircase were painted a light blue and decorated with white clouds cut out of plywood. Under them were children’s drawings, fixed with clothespins to the iron rods running along the wall. Two orange-and-white traffic cones sat as a decoration on the top stair, welcoming us to the cafe.

The room was furnished with tables and chairs in different colors and sizes. There was, even, a ladder in the corner leading up the wall to a small open room directly under the roof which only had space for one table, two chairs, a flower vase, and a candle. Muted voices and African music filled the room. The guests drank foamy chocolate out of huge mugs or sipped colorful batidos, fruit shakes. No two cups, or plates, or glasses were identical. Yuri had, as I learned later, taken dishes he got from friends and donations rather than spending money that could be used on the school.

A backpacker slept on a mattresses in a corner, using his rucksack as a pillow and one of the alpaca wool blankets that usually decorated the room drawn around his body to keep warm. On the wall behind him, a colorful skyline of houses and towers leaned drunkenly to one side or the other, cut out of plywood and screwed to the light blue wall. Yuri and another waiter crisscrossed the room balancing orders on their arms, trying to avoid colliding with the children kneeling on the floor doing jigsaw puzzles.

Yuri gave Heidy a hearty hug as a welcome, introduced himself, kissed me on both cheeks and handed us the menus, picture books actually; he had replaced every second page with a page of the cafe’s menu. My menu was a worn edition of Pinocchio.

Every Sol Yuri makes as profit goes directly into his school. He does not pay himself a Céntimo more than his waiters. The formula for his success: he makes the best hot chocolate you could possibly imagine. “The secret,” he whispered to me, “is in the manzana fundida, the molten butter I mix into the milk.”

All day, the cafe is full of children coming in from the streets to play with the toys and stuffed animals that Yuri collects for them, and they get a plate of soup, or an hour of sleep on one of the worn mattresses on the floor. The rule is that they can stay as long as they want, provided they do not start fighting or try to steal.

Heidy complimented Yuri on the banana batido, the fruit shake she was having. He told us proudly that it had been made by Alex, his hijo. Alex was not his son in the traditional sense of the word: Alex had his own family who lived a few hours from Cusco in a mountain village.

“Why did he leave them?” I asked, surprised.
“Too many children,“ said Yuri sadly, “His family could not support him. He had to leave because he’s the oldest.”

Alex had made it to Cusco and found a job frequently done by street children: he sold candy and cigarettes on the streets. The young venders usually have a “boss” who provides them with the goods and sends them out on the streets. In exchange for the money they make, they get a place to sleep on the floor and something to eat. Since nights in Cusco can get freezingly cold, having a roof over their head is worth the hard work.

Alex had chosen Yuri’s café as the place to sell his goods, and soon made friends with its owner. “I did not want him to do this job,” said Yuri, “I wanted him to go to school, and have a family again!”

Now, the twelve year old boy was living with Yuri, mixing batidos in his kitchen, and getting free English lessons at Heidy’s school. “He wants to be a cook!” explained Yuri with a proud smile, “He is learning quickly!”

~ ~ ~

That day, we were going to plaster a wall, although we had not yet decided how we were to do that, without any masonry tools. But we were confident that we would find a way. “We” were Dan, Dave, Stewart, John and I. We all had signed up for volunteer work through Heidy’s program. Dan, a Korean American, was trying to figure out whether he should apply to grad school or start working. His friend Dave, quiet and reserved, knew a Kurt Vonnegut quotation for every situation. Cheerful Stewart from Texas was always wide awake, always in good humor, and never stopped smiling. The only non-American besides me was John, from London and on his last big solo trip before getting married in August. And then there was me: I had taken a semester off from university to travel and do volunteer work. All in all, a diverse, dedicated and idealistic group. None of us had ever plastered a wall in our lives.

We inspected the adobe garden walls we were to plaster, brown bricks of clay and straw. Yuri wanted them to be plastered a bright white for a friendlier look. Later, there would be a roof put over a part of the garden to form an outdoor classroom. More and more popular, Yanapay was getting too small. As soon as the garden is finished, Yuri wants to realize his next big project: he is collecting money in order to buy a neighboring building, which will be turned into a second school. He proudly pointed out the building he wanted to buy, “We will have space for twice as many little angels! We will have 100 kids every day, instead of only 50!”

According to the year record of Labor Statistics, 5.5 percent of children in Peru between the ages of 10 and 14 and 44 percent between the ages of 15 and19 are working legally. The actual number exceeds the published figures many times over. Peruvian law dictates 13 years of obligatory schooling– a law that does nothing to change reality. The children themselves prefer working on the streets; education does not fill an empty stomach, and all too often, parents are not able to support their big families. Children no older than seven sell cigarettes, scavenge in the garbage, load and unload produce in markets and work in fireworks factories or as shoe shiners in urban centers.

The doors of Aldea Yanapay are open to all children and provide them, according to their individual needs, with cocoa, soup, and education: Some attend public schools in the mornings. Their single mothers work long hours, which often means the only place for them to go in the afternoon is the streets. At the Yanapay school, they get help with their homework, a bath every once in a while, and often the only warm meal of their day. Others do not attend schools; they are taught English by the Yanapay volunteers. A plate of soup or a cup of cocoa makes sure that hunger is not the price for choosing school over working, begging or stealing.

Yuri makes sure that he comes to the school every day, and in between working at his café, advising volunteers, and fixing whatever needs repair, he takes part in the laughter and the tears of the children. I have never seen him brush off a single problem that they came to him with. Yuri is 28, little older than I. He never seems to question what he is doing, or claim attention for it. Tzadikim Nistarim, I thought: According to a Jewish belief, at any given point in time 36 righteous people unknowingly work toward keeping the world from coming to an end. I am not Jewish, and neither is Yuri, I suppose. But in case the tale of the 36 is true, I believe him to be one of them.

“The dog-house!” John shouted, “let’s use that for a ladder!” We flipped the old dog-house over and dragged it to one of the walls. Standing on top, John, the tallest, could just reach the top. Who needed a ladder! The dog would not miss its house: we had accidentally exhumed its corpse the day before, when trying to level the ground of the little garden by digging up the top layer of earth. (“So it goes,” commented Dave.)
I set off to find a few more bowls for mixing the plaster and took the ones used by the children to wash. The perfect proportion of water and cement took a few tries to figure out, and then we worked with our bare hands, dipping them deep into the plaster. We used towels to apply it, slapping them, heavy with plaster, against the walls. Later, we discovered that it was easier to throw a coat of plaster right onto the walls with the help of old soup plates. We worked in silence, sweating to Dave’s little radio playing Jimi Hendrix songs:

The clouds are really low
And they overflow with cotton candy
And battle grounds red and brown
But it’s all in your mind
Don’t think your time on bad things
Just float your little mind around
Look out! Ow!

The midday sun burned down on us – at 3,417 meters above sea level, Andean days can get as hot as the nights can get chilly. Sitting cross-legged on the grave of the dog, handing round our two liter bottle of Fanta, we tasted privilege: we had Fanta to drink. Who else here could say that? The children satisfied their thirst with water at Yanapay. The orange liquid glittered more than it ever had back home, and tasted even sweeter, pricking down my throat and giving me back the energy I had plastered onto the walls. We were covered in plaster, mixed with a few red spots from painting wooden beams the day before. I laughed, exhausted and happy, trying to count John’s freckles of gray and red.

“¡Hola, profesores!” a little voice shouted, and a black haired girl flung her arms around me. Dan, Dave, Steward and John got their hugs next before Alejandra returned to me and perched herself on my knees, leaned her head against my chest and started talking in Spanish. She had just come from public school, math was so difficult! Her mother said she always had to do her homework on time to become a successful woman one day. We had to ask her to slow down when she spoke too fast. She shared our Fanta. I kissed her forehead, pointing to the wall: “¿Cómo se llama esto en español?”, “How is it called in Spanish?”
“¡La pared!” she made me repeat it after her.
“In English, it is ’wall’.”
“Uoll?”
“Si,” I smiled, “Very good! Tú inglés ya está mejor que mi español, no?” “Your English is already better than my Spanish.”
“Very good,” she repeated, dancing around us, “Soy very good en English!”
“You are!” I told her, “But you also have to do your math homework. Wouldn’t it be even better if you not only knew English but math too?”
She frowned thoughtfully, but could not think of an argument against it. “Ayudame con la mathemática!” she insisted, “Help me with math!”
I followed her into the classroom while the others started working again.
Peru’s educational laws are more progressive than those of many other Latin American countries – at least in theory, that is. Public schools are funded by the government and, regardless of their location, have a standardized curriculum throughout the country. The governmental funds, however, do not provide enough money for a school to pay for a lot of teachers. A common result is that one teacher works with several grades at the same time in one classroom, which does not leave much room for attention for the individual student. Public school teachers fare poorly compared with workers in the private, but better than many others in the public sector. While it is difficult to convince bright young people to go into public school teaching, it has turned into a career attractive to those who do not mind a low paying but secure government job. Especially in rural areas, teachers are often absent from school without consequences. In 2001, Nicolas Lynch, who was the Minister of Education at that time, introduced application exams for teachers, claiming to promote a meritocracy of the educational system. However, the Ministry of Education only filled 23,000 out of 32,000 available teaching posts based on the exam results. The remaining 9,000 positions were distributed according to the teachers’ political connections rather than qualifications.

Alejandra got lost between all the numbers in her colorful textbooks. Her voice trembled between anger and frustration, she threatened to rip them up into a thousand little pieces and never ever look at them again. Every so often, tears prevailed, and she would sit in a corner of the classroom hiding her face with her hands. I wished she had the money to go to a private school. But her single mother hardly earned any money working long hours in a restaurant. Sooner or later, Alexandra would have to wake up to the choice between pursuing future dreams and dropping out of school to work, or steal, for a full stomach. That day, however, before we settled down with her math books, Alejandra, the skin around her lips brown with dried cocoa, told me of all the places she wanted to visit one day pointing them out on the beach ball colored like a globe dangling from the ceiling in the Yanapay classroom.

Her homework problems dealt with the theory of sets. I asked her to read the task aloud and take her time. Thinking hard, her furrowed, she found the answer all by herself. Together, we drew overlapping circles containing numbers in her homework book to illustrate the answer. As soon as she had discovered the principle, nothing could stop her from illustrating every example with her crayons. She was completely absorbed in her work, proudly solving all the complicated tasks which had seemed insurmountable only minutes before. It did not matter whether she would ever get so see all the places in North America, Europe and Asia she had touched with her fingers on the globe ball; math, this first strange country right at her own doorstep, was not so foreign any more.
Alejandra was lucky: Since 2003, almost all students should have access to a textbook thanks to a World Bank loan. However, there is anecdotal evidence that teachers and principles sometimes do not distribute the free books but urge parents to get different ones by means of cash payments to the teacher.

The problems do not end with getting the textbooks to the children: teachers use the books infrequently, and often adapt them to their own ideas of what the curriculum should look like. Although adaptations might make sense in individual cases, they often lose sight of the pedagogical objectives of the national curriculum and fail to prepare the children for secondary schools.

~ ~ ~

The boys stuck their heads into the classroom and said that they had finished the walls. I took a look – the walls gleamed bright white in the sun, much friendlier than before. Yuri dropped by and admired our work, then laid out our task for the next day: Building the roof over the garden to make a classroom. None of us had ever built a roof before. But we could do it. Back into the classroom, we got our goodbye hugs, and then we split a 3 Soles taxi home to the volunteer house. We changed our work clothes for the few clean ones we had left and each had a huge plate of 3,50 Soles Aji de Gallina, chicken with yellow pepper sauce and rice, in the neighboring tavern. Then we settled down in the living room, with mugs full of hot coca leaf tea and alpaca blankets to keep us warm. I dipped my tongue into the burning liquid, knowing that I never wanted to leave Peru again.

~ ~ ~

I had to leave, of course. The only thing I could take with me is the memories of Aldea Yanapay. Can one Yuri, can volunteer work, solve a problem the Ministry of Education is not able to solve with 40,000 laptops?

“I am a dreamer,” Yuri answers, when asked whether Aldea Yanapay is more than a drop in the ocean, “and that is what you have to be to make a change.”

He is right. He has built a school out of nothing, and is planning a second one. There may not be many Yuris out there, and maybe there need not be many: The legend of Tzadikim Nistarim suggests that 36 are enough. And at Aldea Yanapay, I believed it was true.

Peru did not start for me the moment the airport’s automatic doors clicked shut behind me and I stepped out into the streets of busy Lima with its filthy smell of pollution and garua, sea fog. Peru only started about a week later in an almost empty bar in Aguas Calientes, a small town a four-hour train ride from Cusco.

The only patrons - Roman, a Peruvian history student, his Bolivian friend, a girl from Maryland, and I - started talking. From a worn-out sofa in a corner of the dimly lit room, I watched the two South Americans aiming their darts at a target. The Bolivian guy was talking about the U.S., obviously trying to impress us with his fluency in English. Roman’s eyes fixed on the darts, avoided being drawn into the lively conversation his friend had succeeded to engage the American girl in. His silence caught my attention, it was untypical Peruvian. However, when his alert gaze spied the camera bag on the table next to my beer bottle, he left his reserve behind. “¿Te gusta la fotografía?” The sofa made a creaking sound as he sat down next to me, reaching for my camera bag. “¡Me apasiona!” I confirmed, handing the stranger my new Canon in a spontaneous fit of trust. His voice seemed capable of producing pictures. Clicking through the digital color snapshots I had taken, he looked disappointed. His world of photography was black and white, but another beer later, he made peace with my digital colors and suggested that we could meet again.

On a hill overlooking Cusco, as I photographed the city creeping up the mountainside, Roman asked me what I saw.
“Houses. And streets. Taxis. More houses.”
Getting his camera ready to shoot, he shook his head, “Can’t you see the puma?”
“The what?”
“The puma,” he smiled.

The city of Cusco, Roman told me, is laid out in form of a puma, the totem animal of the Inca dynasty. The puma’s belly is the main plaza. Once a bog, the area was drained and filled with stones and logs by Sinchi Roca, the second Incan king, at the beginning of his reign around 1230. The puma’s head is marked by the temple and fortress of Sacsayhuaman, completed under the kings Pachacutec and Túpac Yupanqui in 1508. The building is said to have taken seventy years and 20.000 Indio workers. Neither earthquake, nor the Spanish Conquest, nor mere time and daily encroachment have succeeded in destroying it.

Sitting on a park bench, Roman told me more Inca myths, his gaze fixed upon the old camera sleeping in his lap. He spoke slowly, “In 1210, the first Incan king, Manco Cápac, was sent by his fathers, the gods, to mark the navel of the earth with a golden rod. When Manco Cápac plunged the rod into the earth at the place which would later become the center of Cusco, it disappeared into the boggy soil. And Manco Cápac knew where his Gods wanted him to build Qusqu, the capital of his empire.”

He pointed towards Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun, built by Manco Cápac for his father, the sun God Inti. Coricancha once was the most important Inca temple. Originally, the site was a ceremonial center consisting of a number of stone rectangular buildings adorned with gold, their layout connecting different huacas, power spots. On summer solstice, the sunlight falls from a cuneiform opening into the niche which used to house the throne of the Inca king. In the early 16th century, however, large parts of Coricancha were destroyed under Francisco Pizarro. The remains of the Sun Temple complex were integrated into the Church of Santa Domingo built by the Spaniards. Here, at the navel of the earth or the belly button of the puma, was a fusion of Inca- and colonial architecture.
“- - Venga!” I took his hands and dragged him up and back into the 21st century, “let’s see some of Manco Cápac’s walls!”

Starting at the Plaza de Armas, the belly of the puma, we felt our way along its foreleg until we almost reached the paw, the margins of the city. Each of the unpolished blocks, boulders of granite and ryholite fitted together almost seamlessly to make up the cobblestone walls, is unique in its color. Their colors seem to shift with the time of day: almost black at the break of dawn, they slowly turn gray in the morning, then, in the burning midday sun, grow shades of brown, red, and yellow, before returning to gray, then black again. The Incan stonemasons searched for blocks that suited their purposes in shape and size. Stones which were too big or bulky were split: The masons would drive wedges into natural grooves or carve collars into the boulders until an unwanted part broke off.

I stopped and listened to the stories written in the scars running over the buff surface of a dark stone, or the black skin of the old puma. Stories of Inca kings walking through the streets, children camping out between the walls, nestling around a bonfire eating cancha, roasted corn, with their fingers. Women driving alpacas through the town, shouting commands in Quechua through the streets. Even today, women wander through the town driving alpacas, their shoulders covered with woolen blankets woven into colorful mosaic patterns in the form of traditional symbols: the twelve-edged Inca cross, the moon and the sun, the sacred animals - puma, condor, and snake. The leashed alpacas at their side, however, are rarely led to graze on the green hills surrounding Cusco. Rather, they pose for a tourist’s camera, earning their owner a few Soles.

“Belleza!” Roman whispered into my ear, taking a picture of a crack in the wall between two boulders. Cusco was his idea of beauty. Its walls had impelled him to move here from the hectic capital of Lima. He had told me his story the first evening I met him in Aguas Calientes. The story started with one of his first pictures of Cusco, his favorite one. He had been wandering through the streets in the evening, after work, along the tail of the puma. It had started raining – no - it had started to smell of rain – when he saw a corpse on the sidewalk, and a weeping woman, kneeling before it. He moved closer, carefully took his black and white picture, and disappeared unseen.

I did not know, nor did it matter, whether the stories he told me had ever taken place outside of his mind. But when he showed me his camera for the first time, I saw what he meant when he spoke of the Technicolor City of Lima he had left behind for black-and-white Cusco. Lima, a polluted and fast moving metropolis of 8 Million inhabitants, mingled extreme poverty with shining modernity, starvation and upscale casinos, and is clearly a city, or the monstrosity of a city, of the 21st century. Founded in 1535 under Pizarro and his Spanish conquistadors, it lacks the breeze of Inca history Roman needed to feel at home. He clearly belonged to Cusco. I could not think him anywhere else.

He spoke in grayscales, and I listened in color. Countering with my digital Canon that he denied a soul, and with my constant European unrest that he did not quite understand yet was fascinated by, feeling the need to both cure me of it and taste a sip himself. Europe was yet another world he knew from his history books. Unlike Lima, a city speeding forward and dragging its inhabitants along, Europe appeared to him as a historical place with more relaxed pace, yet, paradoxically, occupied by people like me who felt a constant need to hurry.

No one was in the street now besides us. His Minolta burned images in black and white into his camera forever with every mechanical “click!” of the shutter. A street dog. And an old man with a rusty wheelbarrel, the wheel squeaking with every turn it was forced to take. The dog passed us and caught up with the old man. It paused a moment to look at him, or his wheel barrel, then trotted on, its claws drawing a scraping melody from the ground.

The stray dogs belong to the puma as much as its people, its walls, and Roman. The streets are the city’s landfill: Bags of organic garbage line the sidewalks at night, but are gone the next day. Well fed dogs curl up in the shadows of new mornings, contentedly licking their snouts buried under bushy tails.

Roman took a picture of me as my fingers wandered over the crack in the wall, feeling its edges, cool, and rough, and reassuringly stable, as I watched the dog disappear around the corner. “You hungry?”, he asked, and I nodded my head yes. “Vamonos!”, he laughed, took my hand and started running down the street, dragging me along. He led me back into the body of the puma, where the little balconies of the cafes overlooking the Plaza de Armas had started to fill with hungry guests.
The plaza is the beating heart of the puma. Locals are rubbing shoulders with tourists, the poor with the rich. Rickety taxis draw circles around it, speeding bumper-to-bumper, yet never colliding.

We crossed the plaza and left the honking and voices of the puma’s bustling body behind. Dinner with a Peruvian means you avoid the touristy restaurants and cafes of the plaza. Just off the plaza, at Los Plateros, in the neck of the puma, there is a small Italian tavern. No pizza, but five kinds of pasta, and spinach cream soup, and sugary home made limonada for five Soles, little more than 1 US $. I had met Roman here before. The same woman scuffled to our table and presented her one-page menu, and we took equally long to order the same as the first time – spinach cream soup, spaghetti with tomato sauce, and homemade limonada. The last time we had been here, Roman had not gotten further than through half of his green cream soup when he had suddenly looked out of the window and jumped up, “La luz es perfecta, la luz es perfecta, tenemos que irnos!” – “The light is perfect; we need to leave!” He had left without finishing, jumped into the next taxi, I, curious, following, and off we went towards the head of the puma.
We passed the puma’s teeth, Sacsayhuaman, consisting of three different levels of zigzagging walls made of enormous blocks of limestone. The biggest boulder is 8.5 meters high and weighs about 140 tons. How were the blocks moved by their Incan architects? Even today, scientists can only speculate.

Avoiding Sacsayhuaman itself, Roman and I headed for a forest of old high stemmed conifers; trees casually scattered over the puma’s ridge by the Andean Gods, the forest floor free of undergrowth. In the early afternoon, sun and shadows painted long stripes on the ground, rendering proportions unreal. Lying on the needles covering the earth, we took pictures of wooden smell and silence.

Roman started talking again, turning from the photographer he wanted to be into the history student he was. I watched him as he looked up into the sky. He seemed to always have to hold on to static objects, such as the twigs of the conifers above him, when telling stories. “Sacsayhuaman,” he said slowly, waiting for me to close my eyes and let myself be drawn into his story. “The three walls represent the three stages of the Andean religious world - the underground stage, the earth’s surface stage, and the stage of the sky. Besides forming the head and the teeth of the puma, each level of walls has its own totem animal: Mach'aqway, the snake in the underground stage, the Puma as the surface stage, and Kuntur, the condor, in the stage of the sky.” He turned to meet my gaze, still unsure whether I could understand the significance of what he was saying, blinded by my soulless European Technicolor camera.

~ ~ ~
Back in the Italian restaurant, we were eating spaghetti with tomato sauce, probably for the last time. After a month, I was about to leave Cusco behind to head for Nazca, a fourteen-hour overnight bus ride away. As always in moments of parting, when I could not think of anything more to say, since everything had been said already or did not need saying, I quoted fragments of someone else’s worn-out parting thoughts: “Melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land (Ernesto in ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’).” Weeks of traveling awaited me, and everything already behind was safe, locked in bright colors into the memory card of my camera. Roman looked sad. He had not succeeded in capturing my colors on his black-and-white film. “Tranquilo,” I said, just as he normally did when I was turning European, looking at my watch, or wearing too many colors, “I will email. The pictures. In colors. No worries.”