Huaranchal

I went to the mountain village of Huaranchal this weekend. We left at 5:00 am on Friday morning and I just got back Monday at 12:00. It took us over 18 hours to get there because we got a flat tire only 1 hour away from our destination. I can't say that I didn't expect that flat tire though, we had way to many people in a conversion van going off-roading up the side of a mountain. We waited for Auden to get to the destination and look for a tire. He called me about 3 hours later saying that there were no tires that size there so he was going to have to go all the way back to Trujillo, so we were gonna have to spend the night outside or inside the van. I wasn't to thrilled about that. But, he called us back around 10:30 and said that he talked with the Mayor of Huaranchal and that there was a dump truck on its way up. So the Mayor called the dump truck and told them to pick us up and bring us and our things to the city.

Here is a slideshow of some pictures, I'll continue my story later. You can click on it and view the full size pictures which I recommend doing.

When finally arrived at our destination at 12:00 AM. I felt officially initiated into the Peruvian culture after that dump truck ride up the side of a mountain. The hotel was MUCH nicer than I could have imagined. We hadn't seen any civilization within 2 hours of this place, but there we were, in this city that out in the middle of nowhere, had a 3 story hotel with hot showers. It was the best shower I've had since I've been in Peru.

For our first day there, we went around the town telling people that we were going to have a concert and a message that night in their coliseum. I quickly made friends with all the kids in the town since I was pretty much the first white person who spoke Spanish and English that they had ever met. I was surrounded much of the day answering questions about Micheal Jackson, and "how do you say my name in English." I've realized that it's a lot more fun to just make up names for them, rather than tell them that names usually just translate literally. Through talking with them I found out that this city only exists for mining, and that all of their dads worked in the mines, and so did the boys when they weren't in school and were over the age of 10.

In the afternoon Fred set up his projector in the Municipal building and showed a bunch of kids Christian movies. Only about 10 or 15 kids showed up for that. But then later that night after the concert we had, we put the projector on a wall outside and had a crowd of about 60-70 people watching.

The second day was Sunday. Every Sunday a bunch of soccer teams come from all around to play in Huaranchal. I spent the most of the day watching soccer with my gang that had formed yesterday. The other people in the group took a hike to the hot springs. I decided not to go to the hot springs because it was 85 and sunny out, and sitting in a hot-tub and getting a sunburn did not sound like fun at all to me, and that's exactly what happened to most of them. In the evening we had another concert and showed some more films afterwards. There were quite a few people to see the films again.

Overall, I really loved that place. It is by far my favorite place I've been in Peru so far. It's probably the closest thing I've seen to a Utopian society. It's built around a huge soccer field and people just play games of soccer and volley ball all day on the weekends. Store shops never are locked, no one is ever worried someone is going to steal from them. We were able to leave our van abandon on the side of a road for an entire day and night and it was perfectly fine. All of our music and video equipment was never locked up, mainly because there wasn't really a good lock anywhere around, and nothing went missing. So pretty much a completely different attitude than people on the coast. And they are proud to say that too. However they aren't without their problems. They only have 1 doctor, no hospital, only 1 small school building for around 800 students, and surprisingly no police. They have 1 sheriff type guy who is somehow able to keep the peace between 7,000 people. Oh and all the guys were pretty much drunk every minute of the weekend. I'm guessing at some point during the week they have to sober up to work in the mines.