We had just climbed down the face of an enormous mesa on top of which we had spent all day watching archaeologists survey a prehistoric fortified site.
After heaving our belongings and our exhausted selves into a large silver van shaped a bit too ironically like a bullet, we found ourselves tearing down a dirt road, listening to our driver, Edgar, shout questions about our day over his loud, bad music.
Just then, we spotted something out the window.
A small sheep was lying motionless in the mud at the edge of a large puddle which had formed near the opening of a drainage pipe that passed beneath the elevated roadway.
“That sheep looks like it’s been shot,” quipped Kimberly, my partner and photojournalist on the trip, gesturing to some red on the animal’s head. “I wonder why.”
When he realized what we were talking about, Edgar slammed on the breaks, stopping the van in its tracks, threw open his door and ran to the edge of the puddle.
He seized the sheep by its back, sinking his fingers into the dirty, soaking wool, and effortlessly hauled it out of the mud with enough force to have thrown it, had he let go.
While we clumsily caught up, Edgar laid the sheep on the dry ground a couple dozen feet away and began wringing the water out of the animal’s coat like a sponge.
The sheep had sunken into the mud, exhausted itself trying to escape, and was slowly drowning as its mouth became submerged ““ the red was a marking given to every member of the flock to designate ownership.
A few minutes later, a figure began to rise from the horizon; a woman in a straw hat and a long, flowing dress had emerged from a farmhouse in the distance and was slowly walking the 500 yards or so across the plain to meet us.
When she arrived, she thanked Edgar and took over tending to the sheep while we stood silently and watched the sheep slowly become reanimated.
Now, it so happens that Kimberly and I are both from the same small agrarian community in Northern California.
Our homes are both at least a few miles from the nearest town, and we’ve each had plenty of experience with livestock and situations as natural and filthy as what we saw that day on the pampa.
But the moment was truly astonishing, and it was then that Edgar, of all people, taught me the most important lesson I brought home from Peru.
When we embarked on our journey, I had already spent months trying to mentally prepare myself for what I was going to have to accomplish while we were there.
After much reflection, I figured I should approach my reporting with the obvious assumption that I was probably going to alienate some of my Peruvian sources by asking them, as a Westerner, how they feel about the influence of Americans and other Westerners in their country.
I thought that most people, including Peruvians, resented Americans, and so to compensate for that I would have to be extra cautious in my interviews to make sure that my Peruvian sources could tell me how they really felt.
I knew I needed to step out of myself and be as raceless as possible in order for this to be possible.
But Edgar is a perfect example of why all of my reflexive assumptions were wrong.
His selfless and instinctive response to the drowning sheep illustrates what was and is most important to many Peruvians: survival.
The sheep wasn’t his. He didn’t know the person who owned it. He didn’t get anything in return for saving it.
He abandoned the van and got covered in mud in order to salvage something very small, but also something valuable to its owner.
The sheep survived. Because the sheep survived, the woman who owned it, in a small way, was able to continue surviving.
If the woman hadn’t shown up, Edgar may have had thoughts of his own survival; the sheep has intrinsic value which he too could have benefited from.
My failure to recognize that survival was the most thing for my Peruvian sources is the reason that all of my assumptions and questions proved trite.
The opinions held by the Peruvians we spoke to ranged from apathy toward American archaeologists to moderate discontent with the American corporate presence in Peru.
No one we spoke to was especially resentful of the researchers. No one who had dealt with them was particularly skeptical about their intentions. And none of the Peruvian archaeologists and academics we interviewed felt that the Western researchers were significantly limited in their ability to study and interpret Peruvian history and culture.
It was strikingly simple to the Peruvians that the questions I was asking, and the fact that I was asking them, were completely irrelevant.
Their only concern was making it to tomorrow. My race, my project, their culture ““ none of that mattered. All that mattered was whether I could pay them for their time.
After all, for the Peruvians who lack the absolute basics, philosophizing about cultural intrusion is trivial.
Our entire project was predicated on Peruvians caring about Western influence.
I had to go there to find out that they didn’t.
E-mail Weiss at wweiss@ucla.edu.