The Simple Life

Story by Nancy Kimball

Peru cultural immersion program targets transformation in teens, families

The mystery cloaking the high Andes of Peru mirrors the mystery veiling the depths of a troubled teen's mind.

One holds the power to promote healing in the other.

One provides a new window on the other's primeval wisdom.

Now, Mick Stemborski is offering a link for Flathead Valley teens and their parents to experience their own healing connections through a cultural-immersion opportunity called Peru Alive.

It's a unique business, its literature says, "that allows people from outside countries to experience and live a piece of Peruvian culture, while protecting and preserving the Inca traditions from the influences and impacts of foreign visitors."

Connections are critical, Stemborski said, whether between cultures or within a soul.

"They (foster) growth and life and looking for new ways to see them," he said.

An experienced worldwide trekker and guide who now lives in Whitefish, Stemborski also is a licensed clinical professional counselor who contracts the mental-health counseling services at Hedges Elementary in Kalispell. For 12 years, he has provided wilderness, recreational and experiential adventures for adults and children.

In a natural next step, Stemborski took his brand of counseling to an international level.

For the past two summers, he has partnered with Peru Alive founder, host and guide Wilbert Yucra Choqqucunsa to lead groups of 15- to 19-year-old North Americans through five weeks of trekking the Inca Trail, working alongside farmers and townspeople, and living with local families.

Home base for Peru Alive is Yucra's hacienda at Urubamba, a remote village steeped in the Quechua (Inca) heritage 75 kilometers (about 47 miles) outside the ancient city of Cusco in south-central Peru. It's in the heart of the Sacred Valley, not far from the ruins of Machu Picchu.

The cultural partnership is an innovative exchange that allows teens to take an authentic part in the lives of Peruvian people while learning to understand their own lives.

They test their stamina on treks, their resourcefulness on monitored solo wilderness stays, their relational abilities with each other and the locals - and, throughout it all, their flexibility to adapt and change as they merge with a new way of living.

Teens are paired for two- and three-day stays with specific host families to address needs for socializing, self-control, or focus on the simple life.

"That's the goal of our trips," Stemborski said, "to have the kids in their own time and their own way discover that there is a happiness in the simplicity" of this life. "It's not based on having wealth or things."

And, as they tend livestock, harvest crops, play with Peruvian children, help in the kitchen and practice Spanish, something new unfolds and begins to grow within the teens.

Stemborski's goal of sealing that growth is anchored by an optional final-week visit from parents or other family members in hopes that they, too, can see their teen in a new light and establish new patterns of interaction.

"I guarantee your family's values will be challenged as a result of being in a foreign culture," Stemborski said.

Whether that challenge turns into permanent change depends on the family and how they integrate their experiences in the months and years to follow.

Stemborski's discovery of Yucra's land began in 2002 with a personal trek along Peru's Inca Trail. It was Yucra's first year of walking out his vision for Peru Alive, a guide business he established in hopes that it would introduce outsiders to his homeland.

As they trekked and compared philosophies, Stemborski and Yucra discovered they were woven from the same wool.

Both wanted to reduce impacts of the 1,000 people a day (now limited to 500 a day) traveling the Inca Trail. They wanted to establish relationships between the United States' technology-based society and Peru's agrarian society. They hoped to honor both.

"Their culture is based in faith," Stemborski said. "Ours is based in facts."

During the next year or so, the two visited and talked much. They established a certain trust. It grew. They became business partners.

Finally, in 2004, Stemborski took his first teens from Thompson Falls to Peru. This summer he expanded to several more groups in the area. He has lined up a few groups for summer 2006, and is blocking out some space around August for a trip devoted specifically to teens from the Flathead Valley.

They may venture to the Amazon Basin, hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu or explore Cusco. They will get to know the Yucra family, who all share in guiding, cooking and supplying Peru Alive excursions. They will meet local families and distribute school supplies, winter coats or perhaps baby clothes to children they encounter as they trek through the Andes, all gifts which they brought from home and will carry on their own backs.

"They have to bear the load and understand the meaning of the gift and the importance of these material things," to children who own so little, Stemborski said.

"A gift is a symbol of a relationship that is being built. The true meaning of a gift is unconditional … That gift is anonymous and there is no expectation of getting anything back."

He's watched something dawn in his young charges as they distribute these gifts, a certain humility - and something else.

"There's also a slight shame in my kids' eyes when we realize what we have" and take for granted or even disdain, Stemborski said.

To a people who scratch a living out of the rocky earth which gives them the coffee bean, avocado, quinoa and coca leaf - the hub of their religion and a cure for altitude sickness when chewed or brewed as a tea - material wealth is rare.

Family and religion are what make them rich.

With the North American war on the cocaine trade, agriculture has suffered further. The Yucra family is no exception.

But it cannot rob the Sacred Valley and its people of the heritage of the land and their religion. Stemborski stretched to explain it, something he now knows to be true.

"In Peru, magic things happen. I don't know how to define it. It's subtle. It's a mystical place, and it's known for that," he said.

"People come back changed."

But how does he explain his worry for his young son's welfare in Peru melting away under the loving attention of the village women? His mother-in-law's healing from breast cancer? Another's healing in marriage and fertility?

He simply shrugged.

"You learn about love and the things that are important and true."

Peru Alive, he said, shares that with teens and parents and shows them, "it's not just a trip, it's a process."

Call Peru Alive at 862-8860.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com.