At the same time, regardless of your personal experience, it should be noted that well over 50% of Peru’s population live below the “poverty line”, and more than 25% are considered to be living “in destitution” – one of the worst levels in all of Latin America. Henry’s family, while poor, own their own homes, work, pay their bills, raise families, and while his older brothers and sisters haven’t been to college, they’ve all completed high school/secondario, and over half of their kids have been to college.

It’s not necessarily a lack of education (though some of the weird stuff, like the cumin and pepper, are probably just strange family myths that have been passed down started who knows when), but also the quality of education – for example, we went to the Sipán museum, and the “historian” who guided us through, college educated, actually stood there and talked about how in the period that this culture was dominant in the area, from 100-700AD, Europe and Asia were still primitive, barbaric cultures, with little traces of their history from that period – that if you went to “The British Museum” the only things you’d find from that era would be from Sipán and surrounds, that there are no artifacts from the rest of the world. When I asked about the Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, the Greeks, etc., his response was “you’ve been told lots of lies in your schools, none of them ever amounted to anything, nor is their any evidence of them as advanced civilizations”.

This echoes things like our visit a couple of years ago to the Puno area where our tour guide, a doctoral student in astrophysics, was spouting things about how blacks are still slaves in the U.S., that none of them has ever actually been freed or allowed to work a real job (I wonder how he coped with us electing a black president), that he was going to be the first latino in the entire field of astrophysics, because no latino had ever before gotten that far (what about his professors?) – all stuff he was told at the U of Puno. As to the Catholic stuff, it dominates everything from print media to radio to television, and much of the stuff I mentioned is broadcast, daily, into people’s homes on every television channel out there.