I met a beautiful Polish couple, who’s dream it come here to Peru and peruse their passion for archeology and research. Today, you can help them by simply voting for them. It takes just a moment and a little effort, but I am willing to do this for such a passionate couple. Read their story and if you too are inspired by their vision, simply vote for them, TODAY.
~Lainie
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We are young archaeologists from Wroclaw, Poland – Lainie was very kind to give us some writing space on her blog and we’d like to tell you something about our archaeological trekking project.
Recently, we’re trying to organize a trip to Peru – we’re planning to trek into the Amazonas region in the north-east in search of the Chachapoya – “The Cloud People” or “The Warriors of the Clouds”, a pre-Inca tribe best known by their eerie anthropomorphic sarcophagi. Specialists estimate that only 5% of the Chachapoya sites have been properly researched. The biggest issues are: general remoteness of this region (located between Marañón and Huallaga rivers and partly covered in cloud forests) and huaqueros, or tomb raiders destroying the sites in search of precious objects which can be smuggled into Europe or USA.
What we’d like to accomplish is to visit the archaeological sites but also trek deeper into the cloud forest and maybe…, just maybe we’ll find a Chachapoya site that hasn’t been reported yet. This is our biggest dream.
And now, we’d like to share something about what’s driving us and give you our different perspectives on passion and creativity.
Kinga: It may sound corny but archaeology has always been my passion. It must have started when I was an 8-year-old digging in my parent’s garden and dreaming of ancient Egypt. But something happened and in high school I decided to be too rational about my life choices. So, I’ve chosen a path that led straight to working in a controlled environment of a corporate cubicle. Which was fine, until it wasn’t. I began to feel dead inside – devoid of passion and creativity, too tired to even finish reading a book. At almost 25 I’ve decided to change my life dramatically and I’ve started studying archaeology. This is my last year of a five-year archaeology course and I must say that I’ve never been happier and more fulfilled in my life. Next semester I plan to start working on a PhD thesis doing my own research in the field that’s most interesting for me (archaeometry). So if you care deeply about something, if you have a passion – it must be the right path. I think that it’s not as much about right choices as about following your heart’s desire.
Arek: Going there might be the first step onto the path I’ve always seen myself taking. Ever since I was a kid I’ve read unhealthy amounts of adventure novels, from bad fiction like the Indiana Jones novelizations to diaries of real exploration heroes and it showed. Drawing maps and flags of countries I was going to visit some day. I wanted to be everywhere.
When I was eight I was close to finishing my first written story – 65 pages about a family travelling through Europe with regular horse in the trunk of their car. Cute. After that I guess I had several bad years with public education I completely lost faith in the afterhours stuff. Regrettably at 14 all my creative stuff was thrown into the fire. That’s teenage angst directed inwards.
Studying archaeology has given me some insight into the inner workings of history but also allowed me to go places. It’s not much of a journey though, but it certainly allowed the creative juices to flow again and now I’m in a middle of writing The Big One, finally having real faith in what I’m doing.
And there’s Kinga. We’re fueling each other’s interests and together we’re going through “South American phase” digesting a lot of media about archaeology there, jungle and occasional manifestation of Klaus Kinski. It turned out that Peru might be my first real trip.
I’m pretty excited.
We’d really like to go to South America and one way to achieve this is to compete in a voting contest: Piotr Morawski Memorial Award. This contest memorizes Polish mountaineer, Piotr Morawski who died tragically in the Himalayas some years ago. We submitted our project and now (till the end of February) we need to collect as many votes as possible.
Here’s the voting page: http://miejodwage.pl/zgloszenia.php?!=ziemia&id=216 – the description is in Polish, but we also have a blog and there’s an option to translate it into English: http://projekt-huaca.blogspot.com/. And here are our photos: http://projekt-huaca.blogspot.com/p/o-nas.html.
In order to vote, you need to click on “Oddaj głos” button on the left side and then you need to fill in your e-mail address. You’ll receive a confirmation message and the last step is to confirm via clicking on the link provided in this message.
