For a few hours last Wednesday, I forgot all about Christmas – the gifts I hadn’t wrapped, the gifts I hadn’t bought – because Caitlin Ezell Waugh transported me to Guatemala, Cuba, Venezuela, as well as to her native Peru (Maine).

You could say Caitlin, who will turn 23 next month, is a newly minted college graduate (two weeks old), but that’s all wrong when the college is Hampshire in Amherst, Mass. Better to say, Hampshire students mold themselves to their own design. This is the college, founded in 1970, that has no course requirements, no majors, no exams.

Her mother, Devon Waugh, died of cancer in June 2004, after Caitlin’s sophomore year. That September, needing to find her own way through her grief, Caitlin took off for Ecomaya, a school in tiny San Jose Guatemala.

She lived with a Mayan family and began to learn Spanish. She also learned to extract fibers from plants, make ropes of them and weave them into baskets and hammocks, Mayan style.

And as far away from Peru, Maine, as she was, Caitlin was helping in a medicinal herb garden and learning about alternative ways of healing, just as her mother and a close-knit group of friends had been back here in the River Valley for many years.

So you think you know Peru?

The truth is I haven’t spent a lot of time in Peru, Maine. I visit Denise Merrill now and then because these days this daughter of Alice Goulet’s does alterations there instead of on Congress Street.

I went with the Peak a Week gang to the other Black Mountain in Peru last summer via west Peru. I know Worthley Pond is in Peru.

But a commune, a bona fide 1970s hippie commune in Peru?! The group that Caitlin’s parents, Nick and Devon Waugh, were a part of came out of Cambridge, Mass. (How they found Peru is another story for another day.) Like most communes, its members moved on up the road or to other towns and cities. The Waughs eventually bought out all the shares in the house that Caitlin grew up in.

Today, the Waughs are part of a close-knit community comprised of members of the old commune and local people who befriended them. They “get together for dinner monthly and make music together,” Caitlin told me. “It’s an amazing community … wonderful support.”

Finding her way

“There is nothing I wouldn’t give to have had more time with my mother. But I can honestly say her death was a positive experience because of the chain of events linked to it.”

Caitlin has studied in Venezuela and in Cuba. It was her experience in Cuba, I infer, that enabled her to articulate her vision of the world and her place in it.

Caitlin is an artist (sculpture, stained glass) and a writer with powerful interest in international politics, especially the politics of health care.

Three months in Hampshire College/Havana (the only institution in the U.S. that can legally send students to Cuba): she studied with the world-renowned wood sculptor Adel Barroso; worked in her own studio in her host family’s house; vastly improved her Spanish; and grasped the paradoxes of life in Cuba. For example, the embargo severely hampers the economy but allows Cuban culture to flourish.

At her graduation from Hampshire two weeks ago, Caitlin exhibited her thesis work: artwork and a series of essays from her time last year in Venezuela, all of it based on health reform there.

In what she calls a transition from college life (“I never need or want to go to another college party.”) Caitlin will spend January in her studio in Amherst, then on to Waitsfield, Vt., to serve an apprenticeship with Luminosity Glass.

If she is able, Caitlin will go back to Havana to cover the international Biennial Art Festival – “it’s always in Cuba” – in March and April. (Note: you can no longer travel from Canada to Cuba; it’s illegal. Period.)

Asked where she’d like to make her permanent home, Caitlin Waugh responded, “I haven’t found it yet.” She’s not yet 23 and hasn’t found all the answers, but this child of Peru, Maine, is making her way – her way.

Linda Farr Macgregor and her husband, Jim, live in Rumford. She is a freelance writer and author of “Rumford Stories.” Contact her at [email protected].