The Second Ceremony in Cabanaconde

On the way from the kindergarten to the elementary school, we had to climb over ditches and piles of rubble. They were gradually paving the streets of Cabanaconde.
"When we were looking for Asher," Ofer told me, "the whole town was dug up like this. He could have been buried anywhere."
That's what we had been afraid of. Maybe Asher had made the wrong man angry at him, gotten into a fight, and been murdered. The killer could have thrown him over the edge of the canyon or buried him under the rubble in the village streets. No one would have known.
In the two or three weeks between the time that Boaz and Ofer came back empty-handed from Peru to the time when the body was found, we were preparing to hire a team of Israeli specialists to go and look for him. One of the men who would have been on the team said that among the first things they would do would be to check for new and unmarked graves in the cemeteries.
The school building was a simple concrete structure, but large, airy, and attractive. The kids, dressed in uniforms, had gathered in a big courtyard behind the school, and tables had been set up, laden with the books, materials, and equipment we had bought. I was pleased to see piles of world classics in simplified school editions: Cervantes, Moliere, even Moby Dick.
The ceremony at the elementary school was longer and more formal. I spoke in Hebrew, and Ofer translated into Spanish for me. The mayor spoke, saying that Asher wasn't the first person who died accidentally in the Colca Canyon, but we were the first family who ever thought of doing something for the people of Cabanaconde. The Governor spoke, and with my meager Spanish I heard him mention Israel, which was one of the things we had in mind. Then the kids sang a few songs and a five or six of them came up by turns and recited poems in Spanish, with sweeping theatrical movements of their arms and deep bows. One was a patriotic poem about Peru, how they would defend it against all enemies.
Then we gave a notebook, a pencil, and a ballpoint pen to each of the students.
Then, before we left, they gave us presents - Peruvian handicrafts.
Diego, the man who found Asher's body, showed up. His eight-year-old daughter attended the school, and she had been one of the kids who recited poems.
It was two-thirty or so by then. We were all hungry. Ofer invited Diego and his family to meet us in the square, so we could take them out for lunch.
He came with his daughter and his twelve-year old son, but without his wife, who wasn't feeling well, he said.
We headed for a place down the street from the corner of the square, but before we got there we passed a little hotel, which had a restaurant, but whose shutters were drawn. Diego's daughter insisted that she wanted to eat there, saying (I think) that it was her aunt's place. So we knocked, someone rolled up the shutters, and we went in.
Communication with Diego was awkward, since it all went through Ofer, but we could tell he was a kind, very modest person, shy and self-effacing.