Evelyn Kohl LaTorre - Between Inca Walls: A Peace Corps Memoir

They call the Peace Corps the hardest job youll ever love! And Evelyn learns just what this means as she tirelessly serves others and finds multiple varieties of love, from indigenous children who touch her heart to a dashing young man who steals that heart away. A great read for all ages.

Charles David Kleymeyer, PhD, author of the triple award-winning YESHU: A Novel for the Open-Hearted

Evelyn LaTorre tells a story that becomes that of the readers. I was amazed to find myself turning page after page, absorbed in a world I didnt know and would never otherwise know. Scenes remain in my mind, as if these stories are my own. I found myself caught up in adventure after adventure, from busy cities with cobblestone streets to roads that clung to the sides of mountains. I became captivated by Evelyns community of students and peers and the man who became Evelyns big love.

Charlotte Robin Cook, MFA, former publisher, current story editor, and head fiction judge for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards

Travel with Evelyn LaTorre during the chaotic early days of the Peace Corps as she arrives in Peru and must navigate finding housing and suitable volunteer jobs in an unfamiliar land whose language she barely speaks. Along the way, she also finds friends, love, and respect for a new culture. An inspiring journey.

Tish Davidson, editor of the California Writers Club 2019 Literary Review and author of African American Scientists and Inventors and The Vaccine Debate

Walls typically keep people and things both in and out. In this memoir of her days as a Peace corps volunteer, Evelyn LaTorre breaks down those walls and tells a story of establishing relationships and projects in the mountains of Peru in the sixtiesa fascinating story of challenges faced in learning about oneself through the eyes of another culture. Once you start reading, you wont want to put it down.

Dr. Jackie M. Allen, MFT, associate professor of education at the University of LaVerne and coauthor of A Pathway to PDS Partnership: Using the PDSEA Protocol

One of the most enjoyable aspects of my position as President and CEO of the National Peace Corps Association is hearing stories of Peace Corps Volunteers, especially those from the early years. In Between Inca Walls, Evelyn Kohl LaTorre describes her many adventures serving as a community development volunteer in rural Peru in the 1960s. Its fabulous. I really enjoyed it!

Glenn Blumhorst, President and CEO, National Peace Corps Association

All [Peace Corps] Volunteers will appreciate the negotiation process for her site in an isolated community in the Andes. Once Evelyn and her roommate, Marie, finally did find an acceptable home base they worked for eighteen months in a hospital, started 4-H clubs, attended campesino meetings, and taught P.E. in a rudimentary school with a dirt floor. A number of black-and-white photos and a map help bring the authors story to life.

Mark D. Walker, author of Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond

Evelyn LaTorre made two trips. The first, in 1964, was an expedition to Per with the Peace Corps. The second, more recent, was in her memory, recounting that transformative experience. This book is a trip into a part of Per not many people tour. As a Mexican, I also enjoyed reading of her experiences in my country during a forgotten time.

Alade Ventura Medina, author of Entre Los Rotos, winner of the 2019 Mauricio Achar Prize

This book is very engaging and well written. Evelyn has a way of finding drama in interesting and ordinary events alike. Like when she tries to find the Tres Estrella bus station while fearing missing the departure and losing her travel companionsI felt her sweatsoaked dress and brow.

Jackie Reid Dettloff, author of My Mexico

Between Inca Walls

Copyright 2020 Evelyn Kohl LaTorre

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-717-3

E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-718-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020904043

For information, address:

She Writes Press

1569 Solano Ave #546

Berkeley, CA 94707

Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

Included photographs are from the authors personal archive, save those on page 143, provided by Ken S.

This book has been recreated from the authors journals and documents that shes saved for over fifty years. For the sake of readability and brevity, separate incidences have sometimes been combined or presented in altered timeframes. In some instances, the author changed the names of individuals either at their request or her discretion.

When the author lived in Peru from 1964 to 1966, Cuzco, spelled with a z, was the name of both the province and the city. City officials now spell the name of the city as Cusco. In this book the author has chosen to refer to the city as Cusco and the province as Cuzco.

This book is dedicated to my sons, Tony and Tim.
May you value your origins in lovediscovered in the blending of cultures

Contents

E ach spring a torrent of muddy water raced through the ditch and over the four-plank bridge in front of my Ismay, Montana, schoolhouse. The strong current forced most of the seventy first-through-twelfth-graders and the four teachers to detour to the far corner of the playground. There, all but the boy daredevils entered the two-story brick building from the gravel road where the water rushed through a culvert. Most of the year the four-foot deep ditch stood bone dry, like everything else in my corner of southeastern Montana.

One sunny April Saturday in 1949, when I was six, I put on my white rubber overboots and teddy-bear coat with the red trim that Mom had made me. I crossed the road next to our first house a block uphill from the school and squeezed through the barbed-wire fence at the base of the nearby hill. My missionto find the origin of the angry waters that spilled over the school bridge.