Pure Happiness

The Encuentro de Turismo Rural Comunitario (Discovery of Rural Community Tourism) seems like it was a real success for Tuti! We were host to about 30 different professionals from tourist agencies, guides and reporters came through. They were greeted by the mayor and invited to a supper of typical local dishes, including chicharron (fried meat), thick soups of cebada (barley), toasted corn kernels and torta de quinua (quinua cake, very sweet and my favorite).  To drink, they offered non-alcoholic chicha, made from corn, and poured a couple of spoonfuls of a powder called mashka over top.  Its hard to describe the flavor of masacha; it isn't very sweet, just powdery, but it softens any sharp flavors in a drink. So the chicha is smoother when you drink it. It also works well in black coffee, since most don't take milk with their coffee here.  I think the mashka is usually made from ground up quinua.


Sign welcoming everyone involved in the Rural Community Tourism program to Achoma.



Tutenos, from Tuti, setting up tables in front of the
Municipality to welcome their town's guests. The dark
doorway under the large poster, far left, is the doorway
for the new museum.

After lunch, the visitors were guided through a few tables set up in front of the Municipality building. There were some products that I was not even aware Tuti offered. Turns out that a local development organization that helps small towns in the valley, DESCO, assists Tuti with packaging its locally produced masacha de quinua and flakes of quinua and cebada.  Just above the town proper is Tuti's dairy, where they produce yogurt, butter and cheese. All the dairy products and the tubs of manjar, a caramel-like paste, carried a Tutena logo. (Although I don't believe they sold many of these items to the visitors there in Tuti, the following day when we went to Achoma, a city abotu two hours west, for the closing day of the event, urbanites from all over were buying yogurt, cheese and manjar right off the bat.)



Products made at Tuti's dairy or nearby:
 manjar, yogurt and cheese.


The following tables set up had embroidered bags and coinpurses. An artisan had even brought her sewing machine out to give a quick demonstration.

The La Tutena brand. This is mashka,
ground quinua powder..

Senora Narcisa and others
showing organic dairy and
grain products to the visitors.

The final visit was to the new Historical and Cultural Museum of Tuti. I did everything I could to be ready for the big event! First I had to finish re-painting the walls with the two gallons of paint I had brought. Next, I made cut-outs of suns and llamas in posterboard, and spraypainted a series of suns and llamas across the upper border of the walls, to give it some decoration. These suns and llamas are two of the decorations that are found on one of the ceramic jugs in the museum's collection of archaeological materials. Then, with the help of Senora Narcisa's (president of tourism in Tuti) son, we hung the two huge curtain runners on opposite walls, to hang pictures and panels from. Finally, I pestered the artisan's group, in particular their president, until they had traditional clothing ready to hang on the models. I almost had a heart attack; about 30 minutes before the tour bus arrived in Tuti, I and the mother of the artisan's president were trying to cram the 6 ft tall models into the traditional dresses! Unfortunately, it looks like the clothes that we placed on the mannquins will not be the same, exactly, that they wear in the end. The senoras have still not finished the polleras (long, embroidered skirts), only the woman's embroidered jacket and shirt. They had to loan me older skirts and clothing for the male mannequin just for the time being. But all in good time... Everything was ready when the visitors came through!

Embroidered bags made by Tuti artisans.

One of the Tuti artisans
showing off textiles to
visitors.

I gave a talk to two groups of fifteen or so. Below are some photos of the exhibition as it was, and one snapshot I was able to get of a couple of visitors, before the crowd came through.  During my short presentation, I was able to get the business cards and email address of a few different tour guides, anthropologists and others who work in the field of tourism and cultural conservation. One gentleman, a photojournalist, left his information stating that once the museum was able to get a website and a brochure worked up for the museum, he might consider writing about it. Yeah! Brochure shouldn't be hard to finish by mid-January, and I have an American friend living in Tuti as a Peace Corps Volunteer who already had planned on updating the Tuti website. So it looks like everything is in process!

View of the back wall of the museum, complete with mannequins
dressed in traditional clothing and the oral history exhibit on the table.

View of the back left corner, wtih pictures
of local interest.  You can also see the
case wtih the archaeological pieces.



More of the left wall. You can
see the stone model of the irrigation
ancient irrigation system.



The right wall, with the first informative panel,
translated into Spanish, Quechua and English.
The bookcase in the corner has examples of
the artisans' products (keyrings and sweaters)
as well as a list of their names. I'll have pictures
of them to post soon, too.



Back right corner.  Male model and the panel
discussing the history of the two pre-Inka tribes,
the Collaguas and the Cabanas.



Visitors in the museum. If I remember right, the gentlman on
the right was an archaeologist who worked in the north of Peru.

The best part for me was receiving gifts from the artisans when I left. I had accompanied them to Achoma the day after the big event in Tuti, to represent the town at their kiosk in the Achoma fair. I had to leave early to get back to Arequipa, and each one of the three artisans present gave me a little gift: two key chains with embroidered pieces (a little purse and a tiny hat), and a bag of mashka to take home with me. It was the first time I had gotten a gift I hadn't pushed or prodded to get. It was a very special moment for me.

They told me they appreciated the support I had shown them. Besides putting a couple of their items in the museum, I had spent about 2 hours with them taking photos of the artisans in their typical dress in front of all their woven products, and even a few of the ladies at their looms. I am hoping to make a collage to include in the museum exhibit, showing how the artisans work. The women were very grateful for my interst in their work.

This Thursday me and the hubby are heading to Lima to have Thanksgiving with the Fulbright folks. I'm praying for a bit o' pumpkin pie!  Thank goodness that this event in Tuti happened right before the meeting in Lima. I will have to give a 10 minute presentation over my progress on the project, and gearing up for the event has given me plenty of material to share with the Fulbright staff and other scholarship recipients!

And did I mention we were flying??? No 15 hour bus ride. Pure happiness.

Gearing Up

I'm happy to say that it looks like there is some interest growing in Tuti towards the museum.  Great news for me, and a big motivation to keep going!  The only drawback is that I only recently found out about the big tourism event that the Colca Valley will be hosting this coming week!!!

I had heard back in October that some foreigners (foreign to Tuti or to Peru, it wasn't specified) would be coming to visit Tuti. Since I had heard this from the president of the artisan's group, I assumed that the visit was primarily concerned with seeing the artisan's textiles. Wrong!

Turns out that there are over 300 professionals from travel agencies and other tourist associations who are making the trek up to the Colca Valley. Of those, 30 (in two groups of 15) will visit Tuti and its neighboring town, Canacota, on November 18th. The first group will come, eat at one of the local restaurants (there are 3 in Tuti), see the examples of crops, livestock and crafts in the Plaza, take a tour and then make the switch with the second group coming from Canacota.

Ideally the museum would be part of the tour, so I have been running around trying to get the walls repainted and put a decorative border up (copies of symbols found on the ceramics), trying to convince the mayor (who is in Arequipa during the week) to swing by and take up the mannequins and curtain hangers I bought (so I can have a way to hang something on the walls!) and, finally, get the one information panel I do have revised, translated and designed in Photoshop, printed out. Phew!

Unfortunately I haven't been able to work out when and how will we be able to bring glass cases, to exhibit the ceramics, up from Arequipa to the Valley; our friend, a museum director, may sell me a few, but we definitely won't have time to sort out the details before the 18th. So... I'm still thinking of alternatives! Maybe just putting the pieces on a shelf temporarily and watching them like a hawk. However, I am extremely excited that I have been able to get at least about half-way through registering the pieces in the museum. IF I have the chance to finish the paperwork after the 18th it wouldn't be a bad idea; the mayors in Tuti switch in December, and I'd have to start all over again with a new politician, explaining what we're trying to do and why he needs to sign this and that...

The only really new picture I have for the moment is a view of the panel design I laid out:


First finished panel for the Tuti Museum! It explains the history of the Collagua
chieftancy, who lived in the region, in Spanish, Quechua and English.





Shortly after coming back from this event next week, I'll be preparing to go up to Lima for a Thanksgiving meal with the Fulbright folks. Each scholarship recipient will also be presenting what they've accomplished in their research project thus far. I'm thankful that the event is happening right before- what a great opportunity to get photos of the museum in-progress and get feed back from visitors, both outsiders and the tutenos themselves.  This will give me plent of material to present to Fulbright.