Amantani Island Homestay experience

By Kelly Moody
This summer i traveled to Peru and Bolivia and during part of the time there we stayed with a family. I relate this experience to this class because of the uniqueness of the people we stayed with. We traveled to Amantani Island, located in Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. They fact that it is located so high up in the air plays a big role in the dynamic of the culture of the Lake itself, a group of people on one island may never ever interact with a group of people on an island within viewing distance because of the way time is seemingly slowed down on this lake due to the way our biology is affected my the environment. Distance feels further because it takes more to get from place to place. Its kind of like how mountains separate people who could actually be quite close together, but physically it is hard to interact with each other. The lake feels so much bigger than it is, the islands feel so much bigger than they are because of the oxygen level. These people have adapted their lifestyles to this climate. On Amantani Island, 1/3 or more of the people have NEVER left the island. They don't know what it is like to have that faster speed, that time is viewed differently in a city like Lima, closer to sea level where more oxygen is abundant. But in reality, if those people have never left, then how would they even understand at all? i know when we came back down to Lima after being approx. 12,000 feet up for almost 2 weeks, i felt so disassociated and confused. Imagine also the myth associated with living on such an island and having never left it. That island is YOUR world. They have no way of having the global view like we do in the West, because they do not have the technology to do so. Yet they are so happy. we are fooled(like many people in our group unfortunately, with the eurocentrism they brought with them) into thinking they need to adopt technology, they need to adopt to the modern world. Their simple(but not really simple, just less dependent on technology) lifestyles create another reality for them. The island has never even had electricity. The only sense of the outside world they have is these strange people from far far away..'tourists' that bring strange material things, that they can live without but take in anyway because they're gifts, because they don't see the long term implications of the taking of these western material things. Yes, when you stay with families there, you must bring gifts. I had such a moral dilemma before going on the trip--what can i bring them that won't ruin them? Its really hard to find anything, and you also don't want to disrespect them, maybe they expect really new innovative things. Anna and I, my roommate for the trip and on the island, decided to bring things that wouldn't be too terribly unintentionally westernizing. We brought paint sets, paint pads, sticker books( for the kids), pens and pencils--and for fun Anna brought neon colored Hawaiian leis. Pens and pencils...what does that imply? literacy? and the reality is, most of the people on the island are not literate. They only have one store on the island, they rarely use money within the island culture, therefore don't need to have that concept of record keeping with regards to money. Though more and more, people are leaving the island to work in the portside city of Puno, or trade goods in Puno for other crops like quinoa. It is becoming more necessary for literacy on the island, hence the one school(that meets a few times a week, and a teacher from Puno comes to teach all of the children). More children can read and write than adults. The family we stayed with was very interesting. It seemed that everyone lived with the grandparents, and they were the heads of the household. There were two younger children, probably 5 and 8? I could not tell who the mother was, but there were about 3 women who lived in the house. They all looked older than they actually were. The girl that took us places and showed us around was only 16 years old, out of school and could not read or write. with the kind of lifestyle that sustains them on the island alone, there was no need for it. I noticed my family got up really early and tended to their gardens all day long, eating and resting some of the time, or going to the shore. The lifestyle on the island was very agriculturally based, and each family had their own section of land that seemed so much bigger than it was, the families seems so much more separated than they actually physically were because of the air. It was like an invisible quietness in between things, once you finally got to where you were walking to, suddenly reality began to emerge again. It was the most interesting thing i observed. Most of the island is above the tree line, very arid, clean and breezy. When walking from one home to the next, or from one side of the island to the other, going up or downhill, it was like running a marathon taking one step. All of us in our group were in this oxygen deprived subreality, holding our munya up to our noses to open our lungs more. Munya is this wonderful herb they use there to deal with the oxygen, it also is great for digestion and for sickness. Before i went to the island i was really sick from the food(bacteria is different, sanitation is different) and after staying with the family, eating their home grown food(10 different kinds of potatoes, qunioa soup and omelets were the usual meals--very good food) and drinking munya tea with every meal, i felt so healed. It really disappoints me that you cannot find munya ANYWHERE, not even in other parts of Peru, i think it is only found around the Lake. It is the best tea I've ever had. Its different from coca tea, where you can buy the leaves or tea bags anywhere in Peru, any store.
The main thing i wanted to emphasize in this post was literacy. Though the family was not literate, one night Anna, me and the grandfather of the family tried to get in a conversation about our language differences. It was very hard because Spanish was their second language and also ours. Their main language on the island is Quechua though ethnically they are of Aymara descent. Quechua is the language of the Incans, and Aymara is also a language that goes with a ethnicity of a group of people in Peru before the Incans conquered them and enslaved most of them. On nearby Taquile Island, and the Uros Islands, more people speak derivatives of the Aymara language. Anyway, when we were talking to the grandfather in the broken Spanish that we knew, suddenly to demonstrate something to us, he pulled out a pen and paper, obviously a gift from some former hostel inhabitants. He carefully wrote down hello, and goodbye in Quechua for us. He also signaled for me to write in Spanish and in English the same words for hello and goodbye. It was a very interesting moment, because through the mediation of the paper, we could understand each other. The whole time staying with them, the only real way we could communicate was through hand motions, laughs and smiles. I so much wanted to talk to them about their religion or their favorite foods, views on life. that's not possible with the language barrier. But with the paper there in between us, for a moment we understood. He spoke 'hi', i spoke 'yosparasanki'. It wondered how much else he could write, if his daughter or granddaughter could not even read or write.
Though i was very happy about our brief connection through paper, i wondered how me being there, how any of their guests being there had profoundly affected their way of life, or way of viewing the world. With us, they now know there is something OUT there, and does that in a sense dislodge them from the reality that is their home? Their world once was the two hills--pachamama and pachatata (mother and father) where the 2 sides of the island would race to the top of each hill, and if the pachamama won they would have a good harvest that year. the Pachamama always won. But now, what is the significance of that to them? Is it the same?