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This past weekend, Nora and I took a trip to Huánuco, which is the name of both a city and departamento (like a U.S. state) in central Peru. At the recommendation of our friend Roger, we visited a rural area called Shismay and stayed at a spectacular hacienda-turned-hotel, the Casa Hacienda Shismay.

The pueblo of Shismay is about a 45-minute dusty, bumpy taxi ride from the city of Huánuco. Shismay is a small Andean village consisting of about two hundred families who mostly devote themselves to farming small plots of land called chacras. These small farms fill the Esperanza Valley with varying hues of green and gold like a patchwork quilt. (Although, I must concede, this metaphor puzzled the Peruvians we spoke with; apparently, quilts don’t exist in Peru.)

As you can see from my photos, these farms are cultivated from the river basin thousands of feet upward on the sides of the huge cerros, or mountains. It was interesting to note that farms in Shismay are not terraced as I’d observed in other places in Peru. (See, for example, the striking balcones, or terraces, in Arequipa.) Moreover, some of the fields I saw in Shismay were steeper than I’d imagined was possible for a farm, creating perhaps as much as a 40° angle with respect to the horizontal. Somehow, these crafty Peruvians seem to have defeated erosion.

Huánuco is not a tourist mecca like Cuzco. The Lonely Planet offers only a few sparse pages on this area in contrast to perhaps 75 pages for Cuzco and its environs. The hotel we stayed at isn’t even in the Lonely Planet—partly I presume because it’s relatively new (2006), but also because Huánuco just isn’t an area that attracts lots of Gringos or even domestic tourists.

Nora and I took an 8:45 p.m. bus from Lima and arrived in the city of Huánuco at approximately 7:30 a.m. I have now had several misadventures on Latin American buses, and I say without hesitation that this experience was one of the worst. We had been led to believe that the bus would be direct, meaning that it would leave Lima, traverse the Carretera Central up the mountains without stopping, and drop its happy customers off in the Andean town of Huánuco.

Unfortunately, we paid $10 for an eight-hour bus ride, and we got what we paid for. The bus stopped continually during the trip in order to pick up passengers on the road and fill its empty seats. (“¡Este bus va recogiendo, va recogiendo, va recogiendo!” as one exasperated fellow passenger told me. This bus picks people up, picks people up, picks people up!) Whether such practice is corruption on the part of the bus drivers or a pre-mediated, profit-maximizing strategy perpetuated by the empresa (tour company), I do not know. But I do know that the practice is dangerous as it entails picking up random people on the road and allowing them on a bus next to sleeping (i.e., vulnerable) passengers. Further, it slows down the trip for all traveler (turning an eight-hour trip into over ten hours of misery) and allows the cold Andean breeze to swirl in the bus cabin.

Naturally, I forget my jacket, and, in a moment of either weakness or genius (or both), I slept all night with my arms tucked into the legs of a pair of Lucky Brand jeans, turning my turning my extra pair of pants into a makeshift jean jacket. And I’m not even complaining about the bumpy road or the constant switchback turns that made it impossible to fall asleep! Transportes Junin, it’s on!

* * *

In Huánuco on Saturday morning, Nora and I stopped for a delicious and cost-effective breakfast at a local market. For about two dollars—no exaggeration—we bought two delicious juices, Pachamaca-flavored yucca and potatoes, a bag of fresh bread, and a sizeable chunk of cheese. Two dollars! (I love telling people how cheap it is to travel in Peru, until they remind me that I had to pay $600 to fly there—twice.)

At the market, as we were throughout the weekend, Nora and I were struck by how shy yet curious were the huanuqueños (as people from Huánuco are called). One señora (older lady) in the market tapped Nora on the arm and, with a huge grin, told her, “We don’t get a lot of visitors here!” I overheard another woman telling her young child, “¡Mira las gringos!” (Look at the Gringos!) Later, when asking for directions in Shismay, the villagers would look away when answering our questions.

Nora and I are accustomed to the occasional Gringo bomb or “Vere are you frum?” comment directed to us by Peruvians: I’m perhaps the tallest human being in the entire country, and Nora’s long blonde hair makes her quite the novelty in a country brimming with brunettes. But this weekend was something different—less invasive, more curious.

Why the difference in attitude? My guess is that the region has simply had a dearth of foreigners. Although it is a regional capital, Huánuco is a sleepy city whose economy, like many other Peruvian cities in the sierra, is driven by serving as a market clearinghouse for local crops. Moreover, Huánuco experienced bastante terrorismo (quite a bit of terrorism) during the 1980s and early 1990s as an internal war waged throughout Peru. For all intents and purposes, the city was inaccessible for tourists for well over a decade. Now, although the violence has subsided, Huánuco lacks a Machu Picchu or Lake Titicaca to lure tourists.

After eating our economical yet delectable breakfast, Nora and I went searching for a taxi to take us the 17 kilometers to our lodging in the outskirts of Huánuco. We first looked for colectivos, which are taxis that carry groups of passengers and regularly run between two places. Were there any colectivos in Shismay? We asked no fewer than ten people and received discrepant answers each time.

Eventually, we gave up and decided to just take a taxi. “20 soles,” one taxi driver barked to us. “20?” I confirmed with him as we entered his station wagon. He nodded, and we were off. Forty-five dusty, bumpy minutes later, after winding through the river valley, we arrived in Shismay.

I handed the driver a 20-sol note. He looked at me quizzically. “No, no, no, 30, amigo,” he said to me. “No, nos dijiste veinte,” I replied sharply, “No, you told us 20!” He looked at me pleadingly, “Pero, es lejos!” But it’s far!

Well, he was right. It was pretty far for only 20 soles, so Nora gave him 5 soles more in various denominations of pocket change, and we were off.

* * *

Our hotel, the Casa Hacienda Shismay, is a beautifully renovated 19th century working hacienda. We were greeted at the entrance by Maria Elena and Andrés. Andrés is the current administrador (manager) of the place, and Maria Elena, well, her role will take more time to describe. We were the only guest this particular weekend (there are only four guest rooms available). For the rest of the morning and through mid-afternoon, Nora and I rested, ate lunch, and took a tour of the hacienda with Maria Elena.

Maria Elena is the daughter of Don Javier Rolando Tello, who owned the house and nearly 9,000 acres of accompanying farmland in the Esperanza valley until 1979. On September 9th of that year, ownership of the estate was forcibly transferred to the hacienda’s workers and their families as part of the Peruvian Reforma Agraria (agrarian reform) carried out under the military government of General Francisco Morales Bermúdez.

Maria Elena told us she was 18 years old at the time. By law, her family was not allowed to take any items from the house or estate as they left. Hacienda workers, previously laboring under a feudalism-like system, took the name of “San Sebastian of Shismay” in honor of the patron saint.

At the time of the seizure and redistribution of their land, the Tello family still owned a large house and property in the city of Huánuco. Nevertheless, they were forced into difficult times as the family’s economic base was stripped from them. Maria Elena later moved to Lima to attend university.

The members of the Shismay community looked after the hacienda for many years, but, due to the deepening economic and security troubles, the house was left to ruin. As a result of internal violence, Maria Elena told us she hadn’t returned to Shismay until 2004, an absence of more than 20 years. When I asked her what it was like to see her childhood home in ruins, she paused and answered simply, “Difícil.” (Difficult.)

In March 2004, the community of Shismay received a generous private grant for the restoration of the hacienda and conversion of the hacienda warehouses into guest rooms. I’m guessing Maria Elena and her family were behind this change in one way or another; they wanted to restore an element of their own past and also help a struggling community with whom they had such deep roots. (The hacienda is still property of the community and is run by community members.)

Interestingly, Maria Elena told us that she observed much more economic deprivation and related problems—malnutrition, for example—than had existed when her family owned the land. (“What do they eat here?” as Maria Elena answered to one of our queries. “Papa con papa, nomás.” Potatoes with potatoes, that’s about it.) She argued that her father’s extensive farming experience, his knowledge of local markets, and his leadership allowed the land to be much more productive under a single owner than it has been partitioned into more than 100 different plots. “The idea now is to unify land,” she told us.

Was Maria Elena romanticizing the past? Were community members really better off in a scenario that resembled the feudal system? I cannot say for certain. My own socialist tendencies tell me that dividing up haciendas is a good thing, that laborers deserve land, dignity, and economic freedom. But I understand my own bias here, and I’ve heard from more people than just Maria Elena that the Peruvian agrarian reform caused more harm than it did good.

In reflecting on these questions, I can appreciate the numerous complexities at work in Shismay: the balance between European (hacienda owners) and Andean (villagers), between paternalism and liberation, between economic protection and economic freedom, and, perhaps most pertinent, between bottom-up and top-down ideologies of community development.

To us, it was clear that Maria Elena viewed her work as a way to give back to the community of Shismay. However, I don’t think she considered it her community. Maria Elena has attended university in Lima, is a working professional, and now lives in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in all of Peru. Although her family may have owned a hacienda in Shismay, her experience is not in the same constellation of facts as that of peasant farmers who labored on the hacienda. As Nora pointed out, Maria Elena used a lot of “us’s” and “them’s” in describing her relationship with the community.

Allow me to paraphrase one of Nora’s question. We always think that bottom-up, grassroots community organizing is the best model. But what if communities don’t organize on their own? As a practical matter for Shismay: if a paternalistic, top-down approach achieves results, what’s so wrong with that? For all my love of a theoretical liberation of the poor, I’m not sure if I can denounce energies that make tangible differences yet are delivered as external charity.

I could not broach these themes without referencing the antecedents of the internal war in Peru that began in 1980. This conflict, which killed nearly 70,000 Peruvians, was fueled by the Shining Path’s belief that society is so tilted against the poor that society needed to be destroyed before it could be remade. As a corollary, the Maoist organization believed that community-development organizations and charities maintained the very social infrastructure that inhibited the poor’s rise. As one famous Sendero communiqué threatened to NGOs, “You give crumbs to the people to entertain them and fail to realize that the correct path is that of the people’s war.”

In defense of Maria Elena, she also told us about her efforts to catalyze the Shismay governing council, to secure better legal recognition for the community under local law, to diversify economic activities aside from farming, to send the community’s top students to elite schools in Lima and abroad, and to protect the community against nefarious outsiders aiming to exploit its resources (particularly its abundance of water). I didn’t love the way Maria Elena spoke about the people she ostensibly serves, but she sure seems to have gotten things done. What have you and I done lately?

* * *

On Saturday afternoon, Nora and I went on a pleasant walk around Shismay. We had a hairy moment or two with a pack of stray dogs (note: yelling at dogs only makes them madder), but we survived. Flourished, even.

On Sunday, we woke up relatively early and went on spectacular three-hour hike to Lake Mancapozo, which lies perched up in the mountains above Shismay. For 15 soles, our guide Orial direct us through the countryside. Nora and I had a nice conversation with Orial in Spanish—we in our English accent, he in his Quechua accent.

Much of our discussion was centered on Orial giving us exciting lessons on the medicinal properties of various plants. He also painstakingly identified 20 different plants that can be used to make tea. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hated tea.) He also introduced us to one of his friends who sells fresh honey. “Puro, no es adulterado,” Orial told us more than once. It’s pure, nothing is added! He was right. We bought four gooey containers. After the tour, Orial handed us several husks of cancha, or dried corn, from which you can make the best, freshest popcorn. (We had told him previously that we were adictos, or addicts.)

On Sunday night, Nora and I braved another bus ride and headed back to Lima.