Llamaland Diaries

A Tomato Grows in Olmos...well, sort of *

2008-01-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

Gardening is not easy in the desert of Lambayeque. All my neighbors told me it couldn’t be done. They said there wasn’t enough water and if you got something to grow then the lizards would eat the seedlings or the cows/goats/sheep/chickens/turkeys/donkeys would eat the plants. I found through experimenting that some of what they said was partially true. There isn’t much water, especially if your idea of a garden is bigger than a 2 x 1 meter plot and your water comes to you from a chacra half an hour away on a donkey-powered cart. Likewise the animals that live in my neck of the dry forest are HUNGRY and will eat anything that doesn’t poison them (apparently cardboard does not fall into the poisonous catagory). One night, around midnight, my first attempt at gardening was consumed by some rampaging, hungry cows. But with equal amounts of perseverance, obstinacy and naïveté a garden, with lettuce, tomatoes, and beets among other things, does grow in Olmos, Lambayeque.

It’s important to know the rules of gardening in the dry forest. Rule #1 in dry forest/desert gardening is Corral Your Garden. Since nothing else is corralled then you need to put up appropriate protective fencing for your veggies. In my experience this means 2 meter high kincha (sticks/small logs) as perimeter #1 and then ½ meter high plastic fencing (cut up fertilizer bags) around the veggies to keep the lizards out. Rule #2 is to Keep Your Plot Small, no bigger than a 2 x 3 meters because water is scarce. Rule #3, especially for the novice gardener, is Avoid High Maintenance Plants such as tomatoes and peppers because they attract pests and become easily stressed and therefore do not produce well. Rule #4 is Plants Should Be Spaced Closely because this will help to retain soil moisture and therefore help you to conserve your scarce water supply. Rule #5 is Grow Leafy Greens. On the coast people rarely eat leafy green veggies, which is sad because they are some of the most nutritious vegetables AND the easiest to grow. Getting people to grow leafy greens and then teaching them how to prepare them is some of the most important nutritional work you can do as a Peace Corps Volunteer. One caveat to this rule is to provide some measure of shade for lettuces during the hottest months.

Knowing how to set up a garden helped in my initial search for families to participate in this project. But in order to convince anyone that growing their own vegetables was even a possibility I had to find and recruit one family to take on the gardening challenge. Finally after 7 months at site, Sra. Lidia said she would be interested in growing some vegetables. We sowed some seeds in an egg carton and then I gave her the task of watering the seeds as a test of her dedication to the project. This was important because if she could water it enough to enable germination and protect the seedlings from critters then she demonstrated enough dedication to grow a small vegetable plot. After a few weeks, the seeds had sprouted and Sra. Lidia passed her first test. In the next week Sra. Lidia and her sons installed the garden fence of kincha and plastic, dug compost into the garden soil and transplanted her future veggie crop. Everything seemed to be going really, really well until I realized there were some things that I neglected to communicate.

If you don’t teach how to water correctly and consistently, especially in the dry forest/desert, plants will be weak and disease-prone. If you don’t make it clear that this is THEIR garden (not yours) then they will wait for you to come and do the garden tending. Perhaps you can tell that the outcome my first garden in the community wasn’t flawless. And why should it have been. Did I have experience gardening in Olmos, Lambayeque? NO!!!!!!! There were good days though. There was much rejoicing the day we harvested the first head of lettuce for lunch. The worst days were when several of her tomato plants began to suffer Blossom End Rot, a disorder that is often caused when rapidly growing, succulent plants are exposed suddenly to a period of drought, i.e. when the grower doesn’t water enough or consistently. It was difficult to convince the family that the problem was not caused by a pest. I now know to stress proper watering techniques and to show how to stick a finger deep into the soil to check for soil moisture. After teaching proper watering techniques to Sra. Lidia and her family, I left them to their own success or failure and went in search other interested families. I have since learned that they are indeed harvesting some tomatoes.

Armed with a bit more local gardening knowledge and experience under my belt, I am able to help other members of the community realize their own gardens. Sra. Alicia now is grows vegetables for her family and Sudan grass and alfalfa for cuyes she hopes to start raising. I taught her recently that raw beet greens are edible AND delicious and can be harvested from the beet while the root is still growing (make sure to leave a leaf or two on the beet though). After a charla on the basic food groups, a group of women from the Comedor Popular decided to try gardening as a way to increase their vegetable consumption. Four of these women now have garden plots that are producing lettuce, cilantro, carrots, Swiss chard, beets and other nutritious vegetables. They were all required to start seedlings in pots and corral a garden plot before receiving seeds. From this group, Sra. Mercedes gave me a nice boost to my work as a PCV when she said “if it wasn’t for you and your help, I would have never known how easy it is to grow vegetables and help improve my family’s nutrition”.

Sra. Mercedes showing off her carrots and lettuce. Just a few days ago we harvested cucumbers, radishes, and swiss chard. Then I did a mini Fresh From the Garden class where I showed her how to prepare her swiss chard. It was a great day!

Vegetable gardening in the dry forest will never make for a huge, prestigious project that will be highlighted in the regional or national news. Likewise they will never feed lavishly while water is scarce. Still, it is a small, humble project with implausibly large impact. When planned strategically with adherence to the rules stated above, participants can easily supplement their daily goat and rice with high value leafy greens, additional herbs and colorful beets and carrots. When done properly, small garden projects achieve improvements in the diets of Peruvians, even in the dry forest, and help to fulfill Goal 3 of our Community Health Program.

*I wrote this article for CHEVERE, our health program newsletter.

What I´m thankful for....

2007-11-22T05:53:00.000-08:00

a supportive and loving husband with whom I am very very lucky be able to share this crazy life
a wonderful mother who accepts my crazy life even though it gives her more gray hairs and anxiety
4 very cool sisters who are all people I admire and believe in
5 nephews and 4 nieces who are beautiful, intelligent and fun people
My aunts who send me notes filled with love and praise
My cousins who offer guidance and encouragement in my work and life
My in-laws who inspire me to do things that make the world a better place
My friends who ROCK!!! who are there for me, chat with me over the distance via skype, who send me various necessities of life (tampons! tea! chocolate! Midol! New Yorkers!). Moreover, these friends inspire my work, send $$$ to help support it and give me crucial ideas when I think I`ve exhausted my creativity.
My fellow Peace Corps volunteers who are some of the most awesome, daring and creative people I have ever met
Bosses (new and old) who support my work and help me see that I`m not alone in what I am doing and are forgiving when I occasionally slip up.
Weavers who make awesome hammocks, towels and napkins and are willing to listen to the crazy gringa who thinks that there is a world out there that wants to buy their products - all they need to do is organize and believe.
a village of 130 families that still wonders why the crazy gringos are here but nevertheless open up their homes to us, offer a plate of goat and rice even when we´ve already eaten and they haven`t, and worry for our safety.
a beautiful country that I have just begun to explore and still have a year to see (plus whatever time I hang around after Nov. 2008
a bio huertos (small vegetable gardens) project that is just taking shape with some very enthusiastic women have taken a leap of faith that the gringa is speaking the truth when she says that it really is possible to grown vegetables in the desert when there is very little water available.
relatively good health, 25 fewer pounds on my body, ability to express myself in two languages, and a mostly positive propects for my life a life free of drama (if you watch Spanish-language telenovelas you´ll know what I mean)
a year of Peace Corps service completed! One year down, one to go!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I love you and miss you! Come visit!

xoxoxo!! Cyn

Feria de Artesania - Lima

2007-10-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the help of some very generous friends, last week I was able to take two weavers from my site to attend an Artisen Fair held in Lima at the US Embassy and organized by the Peace Corps Small Business program. One of the women had never been to Lima and all week long everyone kept joking that we were going to lose her in the big city.

On Oct. 10th Alicia, Isolina and I departed on the night bus from Chiclayo, loaded down with over 50 weavings, business cards, labels on all of our product, photos and videos of weavings and weavers and our site. I mention these things because they were the work I did for most of the previous week and they turned out pretty nice. The weavers even liked them too.

The next day we arrived in Lima with enough time to get to the Peace Corps office, drop our bags, eat some breakfast and run to the embassy to attend several hours of training and lecture on various business related topics. Topics included very useful information on how to sell/how not to sell, what a group needs to think about when preparing for their market; other information presented seemed perhaps geared towards a group with a bit more experience under their woven belts. But Alicia and Isolina were happy with all of it - except for perhaps the lunch that was served which they thought tasted like donkey (it was beef).

We stayed at a hostal in Miraflores with all the other volunteers and counterparts (12 women in my room!), ate dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant (falafal in Peru - it´s a miracle). Foregoing th opportunity to live it up that night, the 3 of us decided to go to bed (and freeze all night - Lima is soooo cold) and be ready for a big day.

The feria the next day was a great opportunity for us to evaluate what other groups sell, how they display their products, how our prices compare. We chatted and networked with other groups who have more months and years of experience. We strengthened our future market too. An association of artisens in Ferriñafe, not far from our site, is interested in selling our hammocks at their store (yay!). We learned of another store near Trujillo that we could sell on consignment. So even though we only sold 9 items, we made many contacts and learned where we will be next year if we continue working hard.

After a long day at the feria, we had a few hours to kill before our night bus back to Chiclayo. We headed over to Jockey Plaza, a huge American-style mall, to stroll around. As we finished making our way around the bottom floor, I suggested we head upstairs. As we boarded the escalator, Isolina began to scream - fortunately not too loudly. She had never been on an escalator! Of course, where she lives there isn´t even electricity and the biggest city in the region, Chiclayo, doesn´t have any that I know of, so why should she know escalators. I quickly explained to her how we were going to get off the escalator at the top and she followed my instructions and did just fine. We laughed for a long time after that. When we reached the far end of the 2nd floor, we decended to the first floor, now mastering not only the up escalator but also the down escalator. Who knew that I would have such diverse teaching opportunities as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I will load some pictures later. A PC employee took a bunch of photos at the feria and I´m hoping he will email them to me soon. I gave Dan the camera those days to take pictures of some improved cook stoves in the sierra of Lambayeque. It didn´t make sense to bring the camera when the US Embassy doesn´t allow cameras in their building!

Chiclayo, Piloto del Norte

2007-09-16T16:32:00.000-07:00

We are not always fond of our capital city, but it has some pretty cool aspects to it that we grow fonder and fonder of. Chiclayo is such a boom town that many buildings are only halfway finished; occupied, but with the roof sprouting reinforcement bar awaiting the day when there will be enough money to add the next floor on top. Many of the prettier nineteenth century buildings are in poor condition, displaying crumbling adobe where paint and plaster have worn away and never been reapplied. Even new paint gets covered quickly by the ever present dust. This is a desert city and there is no way to hide it. That said, the plaza de armas is pretty with its recent, but imposing and elegant cathedral and the partially burned out city hall.

The Municipality building. It used to have a clock tower until the building caught fire not long before we arrived. They say that they will restore it all one of these days....

This would go a long way to explain our strong patronage of the Hotel Royal, which sits right on the plaza and has great views of the plaza and is a pretty fine looking old structure itself. The Royal has definitely fallen from its greater days but it has a very romantic feel of dilapidated grandeur that makes up for the lack of TV in the rooms or the occasional shortage of hot water.

Evelio, one of the wonderfully kind and helpful staff of the Royal.

The most important member of the staff. Or is he the owner? We call him Bolivar.

Evaristo says that this used to be a restaurant. Would also make a cool ballroom.

If you are in a third floor room you will hear the vultures on the roof in the morning.

The plaza hosts a regular array of public spectacles that make just hanging out to see what is happening good entertainment. Sundays almost always begin with a flag raising and often at least a small military parade. This may be a Peruvian thing in general, but Chiclayanos really like these militaristic parades. Every Sunday you can count on hearing the band strike up the national anthem, and the anthems of the state of Lambayeque and the city of Chiclayo for a big flag raising ceremony. This usually requires a few long passionate patriotic speeches, and often a parade of a few regiments of various of the armed forces.

Preparing to raise the flag.

This band plays miltary marches and occasionally pop songs.

Some weekends will see regiments of civil servants, teachers or filing clerks all decked out in matching suits, doctors, nurses, and obstetricians in their best work uniforms. Sometime the student body of a few high schools and middle schools will celebrate their anniversary, or just their amazing patriotism by marching in the plaza, everyone carrying their banner, rigidly goose stepping with grave expressions. The first several times we saw the goose stepping were pretty weird, especially seeing the kids doing it. Kind of spookily like stepping into a World War II movie. Also, noting that this country has far too rich a history of military coups and caudillo governments, it made me think of Augusto Pinochet’s affection for the song Lilly Marlene. Happily of course, Pinochet is dead now, Chile is not mourning his passing, even George W. Bush could figure out that his victims deserve more sympathy than his supporters, and anyway, this is Peru, where no one likes Chile. Anyway, when look more closely at the whole spectacle it begins to look much more comic than scary. Check out a group of kids who have been practicing this marching for weeks, and they still don’t have it right! They bought or borrowed white gloves to wear just for the occasion but they don’t fit and are way too big and flop around on their hands. One of the bombasts revving up the crowd for the flag raising instructed everyone on the appropriate position for viewing said event “with hand over heart, and the military police will see to it that everyone complies”. It would be scary. But then you look at those poor schlubs in the military police, out of the barracks and in town just for the morning, half of them under nineteen, holding machine guns to be sure, but no one in the crowd takes them seriously. After that the guy up on the dais starts to look pretty silly.

I know that the guys in the middle are supposed to be in Rambo jungle cammo, but they look like haystacks to us.

This being Latin America, the only thing that can upstage the military is the Church. Mostly Chiclayanos don’t get too big and public in their faith. Saturday nights will often have some sort of Jesus rock on the cathedral steps. Occasionally you see a random bunch of school kids marching to save souls, and once or twice we have seen people parading an image of the virgin. But for Corpus Christi they definitely pulled out all the stops. For several blocks up South Balta, the main commercial street, schools and religious fraternities made huge paintings of flower scented sawdust. The fanciest were decorated with flower petals. The paintings led up to the steps of the Cathedral, and at mid morning the bishop led half the town in procession over these paintings to a big outdoor mass.

Sites and Attractions of Northern Peru!

2007-09-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

This is the first of a set of travelogue sorts of entries I plan to write in the next few months. We have recently noted that people don’t have much to picture for Peru besides Machu Pichu. The lost city has recently been declared one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, which it eminently deserves. But if Lonely Planet can truthfully say that many people come to Peru, and even to South America, with no other plan than to see one site, the rest of the country and continent need a little publicity. So I am taking on the job of amateur tourism promoter for the northern end of Peru, giving my best impressions of the good and the bad of whatever I have seen or picked up good info on. If this inspires anyone to come to visit us that would be fantastic….

And of course, we are carrying out our job of helping folks from our country get to know and understand Peru.

I am starting out close to home, but with the site I find most in need of tourism infrastructure development. Think of this as an insiders guide to get past the not so great stuff and straight to the goodies of the city we spend a fair amount of time in, the largest city in our home department of Lambayeque….

Our New(ish) Home

2007-09-16T13:36:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's been awhile. But today we are hopefully going to be posting several blogs we've been working on in our spare time. Yep, we've been busy little Peace Corps volunteers facilitating community meeting for latrine projects, educating about hygiene and nutrition, planting gardens and herding cats (Oh, I mean weavers and beekeepers).

Here's a look at our new home sweet home. But first a little description:

* It has 3 rooms - kitchen/living room/office, our bedroom, and your bedroom/shower room/bikeroom/general storage.

*It has dirt floors - something I never realized the advantage of until now - you can spill water and the floor and it just soaks right in!

*we live in a caserio of 130 families about 3 kilometers up the road from our old caserio.

*we pay a whopping s/. 50 per month (about $17US)

*we have a nicer latrine than before but .... it's still a latrine

*we have 4 hours of electricity per night

*most special of all is that we don't have to share it with anyone else. That is very very nice.

Here are some pictures:

The front of the house - our little casita is a duplex, really.

Our kitchen: the trash cans are where we store our water.

Our living room/office: as you can see we really need more postcards for the walls (hint hint). The splotches on the floor are from water - to keep it hard you are required to throw water on it daily. Quite fun, really.

Our bedroom: yep, it basically just fits the bed.

The view from our front yard, looking north up the old Panamerican. The skies here often can be really dramatic.

Weavers of El Porvenir, Olmos, Lambayeque

2007-08-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

I am lucky enough to live in a community where a few women still practice the centuries old skill of weaving. Most of them learned as little girls, watching their mothers and aunts weaving. In the past it was a good way to earn some extra money for the family and since Alforjas (saddle bags) and Fajas (sashes worn by men) were in fashion and the norm, there was always a local market for their goods. But several years have passed already since these items have fallen out of fashion - now in their place it's baseball caps and cheaply made backpacks. Today few women in the community actively weave because there just isn't anyone locally who can afford a hammock or a hand-woven bath towel (some of their other products). Most have neglected to teach this skill to their daughters. It's rare to find anyone under the age of 45 who knows how to weave. On closer examination this is obvious when one can just as easily convert an old fishing net into a hammock and China has supplied enough cheap bath towels that you just can't make a living at weaving. Or at least, you couldn't until.....

Enter, THE PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEER. I found out early on that one of the most common pieces of "furniture" a peace corps volunteer buys is a hammock. "And why not buy a hammock from another volunteers site", I asked. And lucky for me and the women in my community, other volunteers have responded, "well, why not".

Thus was born my secondary project. I currently work with about 15 women. When I moved into town only about 3 of them were actively weaving - more women now are getting excited about it again because it is showing to be profitable. I meet with them about weekly. We are working on forming an association, electing a board of directors, and improving the quality of their products so that we can sell in fancy stores in tourist-heavy zones and at craft fairs, like the upcoming US Embassy Fair in October.

Carmela, 77, hand spinning thread from raw cotton.

Esperanza, 54, hand twisting industrial thread to make a stronger yarn.

Angela, 56, arranging the warp threads while Teresa and Gloria, in their 40s, watch and learn.

Felicita, 42, weaving a towel.

Carmela braids the ends of a Faja.

Giomara, 12, relaxing in her hammock.

ALMA Verde 2007!

2007-05-19T20:26:00.000-07:00

Just in case this blog gives people the idea that Peace Corps is all about having strange experiences and learning new low tech tricks for better living, we wanted you to see some of the more fun parts of development in rural Peru. The volunteers of Lambyeque (with help from a couple of wonderful La Libertad friends) recently staged a wilderness camp for twenty some girls from around the region, aged 14 to 19. Every volunteer had the option of bringing two girls from their site. At first we had thought of not bringing any, but ended up bringing four. Camp took place at the Reserva Ecologica de Chaparri, a gorgeuos protected area where one can see endangered white winged turkeys, at least four species of hummingbirds, spectacled bears, foxes, deer, and lots more wildlife if you have the patience to look. The girls had sessions in leadership, making beads from strips of magazine paper, self esteem, botany, games, and much more. They had a great time and so did we. I'd say more but the pictures do a better job.

This doesn't do justice to how pretty the place is.

From left to right, Diana, Lorena, and Ketty, plus friends

Diana steps up to say thanks to us volunteers. Thanks Diana!

Making new friends!

Girls Rule!

Learning to make an herbal salve.

Sodis: part 2

2007-05-14T10:24:00.000-07:00

Go back to the previous blog entry to get the details on this water purification method. But here are some pictures of us doing it.

Dan scrubbing bottles - his favorite morning activity after hauling water from the pileta with the help of the donkey. Behind him is the stove that our family uses to cook all their meals. They use charcoal from the native Algarrobo trees. The smoke just floats freely in the kitchen. Fortunately the kitchen is semi-open air.

Dan filling bottles from the big barrel of water in the kitchen. There's a lid for the barrel, but the family is still not clear that it should be on the barrel and not leaning up against it. The two red baskets in the background are for storing vegetables. I encouraged this purchase since before the veggies were stored on a tray or in a cardboard box where flies were free to hang out.

Dan putting bottles up on the roof of the kitchen to disinfect the water. The kitchen is made out of sticks and mud. It looks like a corral...especially when the chickens and turkeys are hanging out in it.

This is Flor. She's the mom of the family we live with. She's the coolest person in the house. She loves her sodis!

"Wages of Fear" Moments

2007-05-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

If you have not had a chance to view this little gem of mid twentieth century film, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, the title of this entry will need some explanation. If you have, the accompanying photos will probably say it all, and you can then decide if you want to bother reading the rest.

The film in brief, revealing as few crucial details as possible: In a tiny backwater of Venezuela, not very long after the end of World War Two, the first noteworthy event since the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, which hasn’t seemed to have made much impression, is the recent arrival of an American oil company. A sad collection of ruined men from Europe and the United States have washed up here through bad luck, bad decisions, bad planning, or a need to get away from wherever they were before, often with the law close behind them. They provide new employment for local whores, and attempt to gain enough money off of the dregs and odd jobs of the American’s bonanza so that they can get out to anywhere else. Mostly they slowly rot and die there. A desperate chance appears in the form of a well fire that can only be put out by an emergency shipment of nitro glycerin to the well head. Two trucks will carry the explosives, which could go off at any bump in the road, driven by expendable men who must be willing to bet their lives. There are of course plenty of these. That’s the story, but of course it’s really all about how damned souls struggle in their own self made hells, while heartless capitalism and an uncaring jungle wait to devour them. Five dead bodies, three and a half breasts, plus tantalizing cleavage from Vera Clouzot, zero special effects explosion scene, and excellent white hair and teeth. Joe Bob says check it out!

I pass all of this along to tell you that if you like this movie, you will love the Peace Corps Peru experience!

This is not to say that our situation is much at all like the movie. Our chances of survival are significantly higher, and our work, even on bad days, is much more pleasant and rewarding. But many interactions with motorized transport could come straight from the film. No explosives (so far), but the same heartless and brutal relationships between men and machines and nature that doesn’t want to be tamed. (Women just get to suffer. Come on, what did you expect of this kind of narrative?)

Most parts of Peru have some form of major construction or reconstruction going on at all times, and work that can’t be done with no other tools than machetes (see earlier entries) requires trucks. Most of these have seen better days. Many buses appear about the same. The one road that attempts to unify the whole country, the Carretera Pan Americana, ignores the mountains in most places, has only recently had many of its bridges repaired after they were washed out by the last El Nino, and can be blocked off by a truck crash, a funeral procession, a very enthusiastic party, a very determined clown, or someone leaving rocks in the road to rob passing vehicles.

In the photo above we see the dump truck that the beekeepers hired to haul gravel to the apiary site, about three kilometers from the paved road, so that they could mix concrete to line a well (hand dug of course).

You don't want this man's job. A bucket full of dirt was dropped on his head last week. Fortunately for everyone, he survived.

This road needed to be improved significantly just to bear burro carts, and it was not all that passable for them. We had to push the cart to help the burro over the hill. Getting the dump truck over the hill took repaving the road with tree branches and brush. They did this several times, and the driver got very annoyed that we wouldn’t cut more trees.

Riding out with this truck was my second motorized adventure on this particular bit of dirt track. In the first, Fidel, treasurer of the beekeepers, decided that because the person who had agreed to bring their burro had failed to show for a work day, he would haul us and our equipment out to the apiary in the very busted down old jeep that had been rusting next to his house. This required siphoning gas from his truck and hotwiring the car. As he ground gears trying to push us through the sand he kept repeating, “Se sufre, pero se aprende!” (He/it suffers, but he/it learns). I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the car or to me.

Riding with Fidel usually turns into an adventure. Last week he took the truck to a sister organization’s apiary so we could see their harvest methods. We were fine after leaving the highway, and going through several villages of decreasing size and increasing altitude. We were even okay driving up the dry streambed, bouncing over small boulders and hitting tree branches along the way. (The guys standing in back didn’t appreciate the tree branches, but they made a game of seeing who would get raked the most by the really thorny branches.)

The trouble came on the way back, when we found that the small concrete culvert that we had driven around in the morning, before crossing the stream that didn’t go anywhere near the culvert, had by mid afternoon acquired two dump trucks, a grader, and a large pile of gravel and boulders that effectively blocked our route back to the highway. Taking the natural approach of any healthy Peruvian male towards a roadblock, Fidel attempted to drive over the gravel pile. Only when the truck achieved a thirty degree angle and started to slip backwards and sideways in a sickening manner did he decide that he needed a different approach. One of the dump trucks pulled up behind and gently shoved Fidel’s over the gravel.

Lest I give the wrong impression of Fidel’s driving, I should note that the road itself, and the terrain it runs through, often provide plenty of drama. Arriving in the beach town of Mancora, where we vacationed during Semana Santa, the Pan Americana drops three or four hundred meters from the arid plateau of northern Piura, dotted here and there by oil derricks and showing signs of particularly savage El Nino damage, through seemingly endless switchbacks, to reach sea level. At each hairpin turn the breaks and transmission of our sad old bus protested deafeningly. Once there we realized that a Spring Break party had broken out in the middle of the one road connecting the border towns along the frontier with Ecuador to the rest of the country. No worries. When the semis wanted to get through they could just hit the horn and push people out of the way. That’s how you do it in little towns in South America where neither the arrival of Spaniards or oil companies or surfers from around the world really impresses the locals.

SODIS - Solar Disinfection of Water

2007-03-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

Just after our arrival in our new site at the end of November I started disinfecting our drinking water using the Sodis method. During our site visit in mid-November, I discovered that the taste of water boiled over a wood or charcoal has a disgusting smoky flavor. It’s like drinking charcoal tea. Refreshing? Hardly. Something different had to be done.

Fortunately during training, we learned about this method of solar disinfection of water. It requires filling plastic bottles (1 liter to 3 liters in size) and putting them on your roof in the full sun for a minimum of 6 hours. I was pretty skeptical and a bit worried. I had heard dire warnings from people that reusing plastic water bottles was dangerous because of leached toxins, high levels of bacteria, and poly-estrogen. This all may still be likely but sadly not our immediate concerns. We are more concerned about diarrhea, parasites and dehydration in the mid-90 degree desert weather. Of course this is also a concern for everyone else in El Porvenir too. However, many people forego boiling their water because they despise the taste, and instead drink untreated water. As a result, many suffer from diarrhea, and parasites or dehydration and kidney problems. An infant of 7 months from Cerro de Falla, a nearby caserio, recently died as a result of diarrhea – I don’t know the cause of the diarrhea, but it was dehydration that killed the child.

Over the last 3 ½ months it has become clear that not only is the Sodis method helpful for Dan & I, but also something I can pass along. Our host family has taken to it, especially Flor, our “mom” (she’s 33 year old so the “ ” are appropriate) who has become my local spokesperson for it. Also Dr. Marco at the health post in Querpón promotes it too. It’s been easy work for me. All I’ve done is tell a few key people about it and they’ve run with it. The doctor researched it online and Flor thinks it’s great because she doesn’t need to use charcoal, gas or wood and it tastes just like “raw” water. After an initial experimental phase of a week or so where we determined that it worked (look Ma, no diarrhea!), we offered to share it with our host family. They slowly started to drink it, but since it was in cumbersome plastic bottles that the teenagers had to unscrew (!!) and then pour into a glass (!!!), something far more difficult than drinking directly from the pitcher they dipped into the water barrel, they were slower to take to it than Flor. In January we purchased a 20 liter water jug (think Sparklets container with a spigot) that we now pour our sodis-ed water into. The teenagers found this way easier to navigate, even simpler than the pitcher/barrel method of drinking water. I did have to nip in the bud that practice of drinking directly from the spigot (Sucio! Dirty!). Being teenagers, they now fluctuate between drinking Sodis water (obedient children) to defiantly drinking from the water barrel (Qué Rebellious!). During the summer (that’s December, January and Febuary here in the southern hemisphere) we had a lot of kids running around the house and they were all fascinated with the water in the jug. We were soon going through 20 liters per day! Far more than a family of 6 can go through alone. Señora Fany, aka grandma, next door started doing her own Sodis water and ha pasado la voz (literally “passed the voice”) to her daughter way out in the campo and now her daughter is doing it too. Amazing how easy these things are to do. Just this pass week, Flor suggested the process to my favorite neighbor, Señora Carmela (77 year old, weaver, cute as a button, about 4ft. 8) who asked for some plastic bottles.

I’m trying not to do the hard sell on this disinfection process because, hey, if they are already boiling the water and are accustomed to the flavor why change. Also, there aren’t that many plastic bottles to be found out in the campo. People are poor and therefore don’t drink gaseosas (soft drinks) or buy bottled water so there just isn’t the supply of water bottles to do this project. I have found a few sources to help supply bottles for the project: 1) Dan & I – every time we go into the city we drink bottled water and bring the empty bottles back to the campo; 2) the hotel we stay at in Chiclayo is saving empty water bottles that are left by other hotel guests.

So check out the information at their website www.sodis.ch/. It might calm some of your fears about the method, or not. You might still be thinking that we are putting our selves at elevated risks for cancer. Of course, smoking for 15 years and living in LA for 10 I’m sure was fine for my health……….. ;)

I’ll post pictures later documenting the process for all you evidence nerds.

The Goat Bus

2007-02-12T09:42:00.000-08:00

So some of you have already been regaled with stories of "the goat bus". Expreso Barrueto, as it is formally known, is our most direct transport to the big city of Chiclayo along the old Panamerican Hwy. Guido (the driver), Chupaca (the cobrador) and the cast of other fellows pass our caserio of El Porvenir every morning around 7am, picking up people and livestock anywhere along the route. People ride inside, goats, pigs, sheep ride in the luggage compartment and turkeys and chickens ride up top. It's not the tidiest or newest bus but it is comfortable and provides lot of free entertainment for you S/.7. Here's a little bit of what we saw last week.

Beekeeping 101? Anyone? Anyone?

2007-01-06T17:55:00.000-08:00

As noted earlier, my big activities as a Peace Corps Volunteer so far have centered on beekeeping and beekeepers. Before coming to Peru neither Cynthia nor I had really any experience with bees besides running away from them. When we were members of the late and lamented Echo Park Community Garden we shared growing space and time with Kirk, a fine beekeeper, who kept his hives in the garden and captured a swarm that turned up near our house one day. He had a lovely little saying of beekeeper’s knowledge that went something like “A swarm in May is worth a bot in hay, but a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon.” If Kirk or anyone else out there can help me with the wording and significance of this saying, please write!

The first few times putting on the veil and bee suit and walking in amongst bees that we were actively annoying were pretty nerve wracking. A drop of my own sweat fell in my eye, and for a few terrifying seconds I thought that a bee had gotten inside my veil and had stung my eye. My more experienced compatriots ran to my side and blew smoke in my face. This is the right thing to do, as it takes away any aggressive urge the bee has, but does nothing for clear vision. I have gotten more used to it now, and the fascination of watching the bees at work doing their beelike things is taking over. And there is a definite rush to standing in a cloud of very pissed off bees, some of whom are willing to sacrifice their own lives to sting you, and feel almost entirely safe. Sometimes you can watch them sting your gloves, and slowly pull away from you, leaving a piece of themselves, a still pulsing sack of poison, stuck in the leather, which the bee wishes was your skin. Sometimes we have had to pull out combs with young bees developing in their cells, and you can see the little grub stage of their development, and newly hatching bees eating the wax cap over their cells, with perfect new bee faces. I may have to take this up when I return to the U.S. The rewards are delicious! A piece of fresh comb, cut from the hive, with a mix of honey and pollen dripping off the wax may be the best all natural candy bar ever!

Scenes from campo life

2007-01-06T07:19:00.000-08:00

Amazing stand of cactus and the amazing Victor or "El Maestro" as he's locally called

Local method of travel to locations lacking mobility. Don't worry, Mom! That's not our method.

Me and my friends at the school holiday Chocolatada

Free range sheep and the Old Panamerican Highway

Free range rooster and turkey

Ba Ba black sheep - ain't he cute!

Documenting illegal logging of Algarrobo trees. This beautiful hardwood is burned to make charcoal for cooking!!!???

More illegal logging

View from the front yard during the late afternoon futbol game

A nearly finished Cocina Mejorada or Improved cookstove - uses very little wood fuel to cook meals - should help cut down on the demand for charcoal and therefore illegal logging.

Some of our adorable teenage friends

Cutting canes for the honey harvest house

Low tech construction of honey harvest house

Beekeeping, step 1: Suit up

Beekeeping, step 2: piss off bees

Beekeeping, step 3: Rip them out of the box

Beekeeping, step 4: Eat their hard work! Yummmmmmmmmmmm......

This Low Tech Life

2007-01-06T07:09:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, on the second day of construction of a small house where we will soon harvest honey, one of the beekeepers I work with here asked a complicated question. “So do people build houses like this in the U.S.?” I get questions like that pretty often, and I usually have to scratch my head a bit to answer them. I looked around our construction site. Salome made fine adjustments to one of the log cornerposts with an axe, while Gabriel and a couple other fellows raised a beam across the other two corners we had planted in holes dug with the point of a machete. The rest of the crew industriously cut canes of green overo bush to the right length to weave into walls. Do people build houses like this in the U.S.? In National Geographic specials on T.V., in Alaska they might! My answer came out as a somewhat garbled translation into Spanish. Words fail me in English when I try to convey the differences between life in this slice of the Peruvian campo and life back in the U.S., and my Spanish is only slowly building up to the job of describing them. I will probably do a bad job of conveying this in English as well. Have patience.

The purpose of the honey house is to provide a safe and relatively sterile environment to harvest and pack honey from the thirty hives currently run by the association of beekeepers I work with. Every member also keeps at least that many hives on his or her own, but these hives and the honey house, the harvest equipment, and the 3km radius around the hives all meet the specifications for certified organic honey. Along with production from several other associations of beekeepers we hope to start exporting, possibly to the U.S., Japan, or the European Union. This is a fairly twenty first century enterprise. But the tools we use to accomplish all of this seems very nineteenth century, or perhaps earlier. Besides the axes and machetes that I have mentioned, the other tools we used to build included one shovel, a three and a half meter measuring tape, which was a little short for a three by four meter structure, a string to mark lines with, and another string with a weight on it as a level. I’m happy to report that the master builders knew the Pythagorean theorem as well as my carpenter brother in law, and it works for making square corners just as well as it did when they built the pyramids. The frame and roof beams of this little house are built of rough cut trunks of algarrobo trees and bamboo, and the walls are curtains of woven canes plastered with a mixture of mud and sawdust. Fans of Tudor architecture will recognize the technique of half timbering, a good way to stretch scarce or expensive lumber. Everything we used at the site, including water to mix the mud plaster and cement for the floor, had to get hauled in on burro cart.

Another question I get frequently is “Do you have many burro carts in the U.S.?” Well maybe, I think, way out in the campo of the U.S. But then the image comes to mind of the advertisement for the Los Angeles County Fair touting the original four by four, our friend the burro. At various times, usually when the only car we owned among us was an absolute broken down old beater, my brother and our brother in law would joke about how we confidently could jump into out Thunder Chariot in the morning and roar off on whatever errand we needed to pursue. We noted how our rusting heaps of barely functioning machinery marked us as lords of earthly creation, infinitely more privileged than the majority of the world’s population. I think upon this often, as I sit on the donkey cart on the way to the well to get the hundred and fifty or so liters of water we run through about every day and a half. I note how privileged I am to live with a family that owns both donkey and cart, and lives only two kilometers from the well with the diesel driven pump.

A little side note on access to water: That hundred and fifty odd liters that our family of six goes through is huge water consumption. People who have no cart for their burro can only use as much as the burro can carry in giant saddlebags, usually two or for a big strong burro, four big jugs, about twenty liters each. I had a good chance to note just how much less water that means when the tire on our burro cart completely died. It had been flat for two weeks, but the cart still ran, painfully slowly, through the soft sandy soil here, and no one seemed to be in a rush to fix it. Then the wheel just stopped moving. To complicate matters more, the motorist in charge of the diesel pump took New Years day off, and then a couple more after. I can’t blame him, as the pump runs constantly and loudly to keep water flowing to the lime and mango orchards, and he never gets a break. But when the pump doesn’t run, we have to fall back on the hand cranked wells, and the closest one gives slightly saline water. We have been borrowing the use of a friend’s burro and on some days we can use brother Gabriel’s cart, so we get by okay, but it underlines the lack of access everyone here faces. When the rainy season comes the well will shut down more often, as you don’t need to pump water to an orchard that is getting irrigated by the rain. Water flows in what are now dry river beds, but this carries run off from the surrounding countryside, where almost no one has a latrine. We are planting the idea of harvesting rainwater from roofs. In one rainstorm we set out buckets and washtubs under the eaves and collected about twenty gallons.

Between the burro carts, the free ranging livestock wandering everywhere, the immense value of the few hand operated wells, the occasional neighbor riding by on a horse, or the kerosene lamps and candles we use for lighting many nights, the campo feels at times very much like an old western movie. Late at night the silence is only broken by the occasional dog barking, rooster crowing, or donkey braying. Then there are the nights when our host family decides to burn some gas in the generator they own, and we watch T.V. from Lima or badly pirated DVD copies of kung fu movies from the seventies. Some nights I hear cumbia music echoing through the night and lights on the horizon coming from a place far out in the campo where electricity only comes from a generator. It’s a little strange, but someone is having some fun. That’s how life is out in the campo

Care Package Wish List

2006-12-22T12:55:00.000-08:00

People are asking us what we need. Here´s a list of things that would be super to receive!

**WARNING** Please send items in a padded envelope and no more than a few pounds. Boxes get diverted to customs/aduana where items are pilferred :( Also, when filling out the customs forms, please don't give the package a high value. Thanks!

Emergen-C vitamin packets
Tea: Chai, Green Tea, Peppermint, English Breakfast
Altoids
LED key chain flash lights
Leatherman pocket knife
Headlamp
old Magazines: New Yorker, People, Harpers, etc
AAA batteries
Zicam cold remedy gel swabs
Wellness Formula (tincture) with echinacea, goldenseal, and yin chao
Organic cotton tampons (regular)
headlamp
hand clipper for plants
hand fans
UNO card game

It´s Official....

2006-12-22T12:52:00.000-08:00

....75F degrees is cold! The rains have started and this morning I awoke to find goosebump inducing temperature.

You can all stop laughing now!

The Super Campo Lifestyle

2006-12-20T09:21:00.000-08:00

We just passed 3 weeks in El Porvenir! Living in the campo takes some getting used to when you`re used to city life, but I am realizing just how awesome this experience is for us. Like one of my favorite bloggers Foodie Farmgirl, I have always dreamed of living in the country but really don`t have the fortitude to do it. The problem in my mind is how one makes a living so far outside economic centers. Peace Corps has at least momentarily solved that problem for us by providing a small stipend to live and work in the campo. I know that here we will learn all sorts of skills for living from scratch. So what have we been doing? Well.....

Current projects:
I (Cynthia) have been visiting the health post in the next casarillo getting to know the staff and learning about the health challenges facing the communities of El Porvenir and Querpon. People seem to mostly suffer from diarhea and respiratory infections. These happen acutely in a seasonal fashion - when it`s dry and hot and dusty, there`s more respiratory problems and when it`s rainy and flooded there`s more diarhea. The main causes for these illnesses is the lack of water. As an example, the water for our house is located a 1/2 hour walk away and fortunetly our family has their very own donkey and cart to carry the water back. This is done daily. When it is laundry day it is sometimes done twice. For families that don`t have a donkey or cart, they either pay someone to deliver it (about 1 sol per water container) or they haul it themselves on their backs. For those people who pay or haul it on their backs, they are VERY conservative with their water use, i.e. they don`t bath, wash they dishes or wash their hands as often as they should, etc. This is were the connection between diarhea and lack of water comes in. The other cause of diarhea in the rainy season, as far as I can tell, is the lack of latrines. People don`t have latrines to crap in, so they crap behind a bush or wherever out in the campo. When it rains, the feces (theirs and I imagine the animal feces) contaminate sources of drinking water. If people don`t boil their water ( or disinfect it in some other manner) they suffer from diarhea. So as you can see, there are some serious issues here in the campo. I am hoping that in my two years here I can help people to see the healthfulness of latrines, hand washing, bathing, etc. I also hope that I can facilitate the development of a better water system. We´ll see what happens.

People are incredibly kind to us. Everyone wants to feed us and have us visit them. We are trying to comply but the heat sort of make functioning in the afternoon and major challenge, for us especially, but also for most everyone else. The sensible place to be between the hours of 1pm and 4pm is in a hammock under a big shady algarrobo tree or mango tree. Still, around 4pm, people start to come out of their houses and socialize. It`s a good time to catch up on the gossip or chat about the heat. Everyone asks what we`ll be doing for Navidad and are surprised to hear that we are sticking around. Yep, we`ll be here too with ya`ll eating turkey, pantone and drinking hot chocolate. That, by the way, is apparently what everyone in northern Lambayeque and perhaps all of Perú eat on Christmas - in case you were wondering.

Back to the heat, though, since it is a major topic of conversation for us these days. By 9am, if it`s not 90F it`s a miracle. Knock on wood, it hasn`t gotten over 98F. I pray for cloudy days because it so far hasn`t gotten over 88F on those days. And people, it`s not even summer yet!! Dan & I laughed the other day when we realized how cool and refreshing 85F felt. If JR or Malia is reading this - I think we might be ready for Hawaiin weather. At this rate, 70F will feel mighty chilly!

We want to wish ya`ll fabulous, super rico holidays. We miss you and think of you often. Please write to us and send us something to hang on our wall. Here`s our current address:

Our names/Cuerpo de Paz
Casilla Postal No. 208
Serpost Chiclayo
Chiclayo, Lambayeque
Perú

xoxoxo!

Elections!

2006-11-21T14:39:00.000-08:00

(from Sunday, November 19, 2006)

Today is Election Day in Peru. Local offices all over the country are up for election today, including alcaldes (mayors), regidores (roughly city council members), and governors of departments (equivalent to states). Voting is mandatory in Peru. If you don’t vote you have to pay a fine, which is not huge, but is certainly big enough to get you out to the polls if you can possibly get there. A few of our language teachers who live in other parts of the country, except for when they are on contract to teach us in Lima, have decided that they will just have to swallow the fine because they would spend more in time and money getting to their home cities than they will lose to the fine. It is a little sad to see that they won’t be able to express their choice, but after the fiasco we went through trying to vote by mail on a long California ballot, I can’t fault them. Our host mom and dad left early this morning to go vote in the little town in the mountains that they still consider home, even though they live here in Santa Eulalia. Their daughter votes here and we noticed that she got dressed in her best to go to the polls.

Today and yesterday were probably the soberest days in Peru all year. The Ley Seca went into effect on Friday. On Election Day and the day before, sale and consumption of liquor of any kind is illegal, nationwide. Take your democratic rights seriously! Don’t drink and vote! It is also very quiet compared to the last couple of weeks. Campaign fever has been pretty wild recently, with convoys of vans stuffed with partisans rolling through the streets, waving banners and cheering for their candidates. One rally we encountered in Lambayeque announced itself from blocks away with the theme music to Star Wars blasting out of huge speakers rolling along on trucks. Posters decorate every surface, and fireworks have habitually boomed throughout the day and night. All of that ended, by law, on Friday. Political rallies and gatherings are prohibited until after the polls close. Having just gone through an electoral cycle in the U.S., it is fun to compare and contrast how it works here and there. Considering the hard times that this country has suffered through in the past, it is very good to see their democracy out in full force.

Our new home

2006-11-21T14:31:00.000-08:00

We have seen our new home, and we like what we have seen. We will be living in the dry forest, a sort of intermediate zone between the desert of the coast and the more humid mountains that receive precipitation from the Amazon Basin. (I am finally getting used to the idea that almost any precipitation comes from the Atlantic Ocean, on the other side of the continent. To a temperate raised Californian the obvious source of rain is the ocean I happen to be next to, the Pacific. It doesn’t work like that in this equatorial land. The cold current that sweeps north toward the equator doesn’t give up much evaporation, and the winds tend to blow westward, away from land. Humidity has to travel slowly on the same slow westerly winds across the rainforest to get to us, and much of it gets squeezed out of the clouds by the Andes. Towards the border of Ecuador the mountains aren’t so high, and a little more jungle like environment reaches the Pacific, but mostly, Costa means desert.)

The dry forest could look like a dry oak forest in certain lights, if your vision were a little blurry. The dominant tree, the algarrobo, is even more drought resistant, gives many seeds that can feed people or animals, and has wood like iron. Unfortunately, restaurants value that wood highly, as is, or as charcoal, for roasting chickens. Pollo a la Brasa should be a source of shame to eat, but sadly no one knows this. Between wood cutting and forest clearance in areas where enough irrigation can be gotten to make agriculture worthwhile, this whole ecosystem is endangered. Mammals like anteaters have already disappeared from most of the dry forest, and on a walk with our bird biologist colleague we saw two species that he figured had little time left on this earth.

We will be in the most northern corner of Lambayeque in a little caserío called El Porvenir. This is essentially a collection of houses strung along the old Panamerican Highway. Our section of the dry forest seems even dryer than the usual, with lots of space between the trees, and mostly sand and a bit of dry grass in between. It is so dry that many locals are excited about the prospect of El Nino floods. Our water will come from one of two wells near our house. The closer one gives salty water, good enough to wash with, but a little hard to drink or to grow plants with. The well with sweeter water is about two kilometers from the house.

We will be living with a family; Flor Serrato, Bernardo Montalbán, and their three children, GianMarco, 15, Marleni, 13, and Gustavo, ten months. Bernardo is the President of the local beekeepers’ association, and drives a cab five days a week. Flor keeps a store inside the house, selling animal feeds and sundry household needs and small luxuries from the big bad city. Our house has a gas powered electric generator that gets fired up every evening to watch a little television. That is all of the electricity in the neighborhood. The caserío across the river, Insculas, has a bigger generator that serves about ten houses that pay a sol a day for the privilege. Our latrine is basically a pit to poop in, with a cover over all but a little hole, and a fence for privacy. It is about 50 meters from the house, which is a bit of a walk at night. It also serves as our garbage dump, though only inorganics go into it. Organics get fed to the critters. Our whole house except for the back patio/kitchen has concrete floors. We feel very lucky compared to other aspirantes who have so far found dirt floors, no beds, or in a few cases, no room of their own, or no houses at all.

Most of the local livestock, goats, donkeys, cattle, sheep, and pigs, range free between the houses, so the ground is littered with manure. Forage grows sparsely enough that it seems like corralling the animals to conserve the manure would require too much work to bring in feed. I must research this more. People keep chickens and doves, but I have not seen ducks or guinea pigs (cuyes) yet. Down in Illimo, a mere hour and forty minutes down the carretera, duck raising is very big, and cuy corrals can hold as many as eighty at a time. (Incidentally, Cynthia and I have yet to eat cuy, which causes us a little shame. What kind of volunteers are we?)

Our entry into town was a little dramatic. We have had less digestive trouble than most of our compatriots, but my luck ran out on our first visit to site. Tuesday we stayed in the biggest city in Lambayeque, Chiclayo, in a hotel, to have a conference with other volunteers and to meet the counterparts we will work with. We met Bernardo then, and he told us that we would have no community meetings on Wednesday when we were to arrive in town. We were scheduled to leave Chiclayo at 7am on Wednesday morning for the two hour cab ride to Olmos, our district capitol, where Bernardo would pick us up in his cab to drive us the rest of the way to his house. I awoke that morning at five, with pretty serious diarrhea. I optimistically decided that I could rid my body of the evils with a long session in the bathroom, and be fine for the road in an hour. And by six thirty I felt reasonably well, if not great. Then on the cab ride to Olmos I had to ask the driver to stop the cab so I could vomit on the side of the road. Fine, I figured, get the evils out. We made it to Olmos and into El Porvenir with no further incident, but I stopped feeling or looking so well. That was when Bernardo told us that we had a small meeting planned. Apparently the presidents and treasurers of the local soup kitchens and vaso de leche programs wanted to meet us. We loaded back into the car to drive across the highway to a little meeting room, stopping to pick up the oldest resident of the town, also the local historian. The ladies all introduced themselves and told us their positions. Cynthia introduced herself and said a few nice words about our happiness at having been sent to live in their town for two years, and her anticipation of much productive cooperation with them. She then turned to me and said “mi esposo también quiere decir unas palabras”. At which point I ran out the door and vomited some more. Eventually I was able to crawl back into the room, prop myself up in the chair and tell everyone that they clearly had great wealth in organization, and that I looked forward to working with them. They all thanked me for the nice words and looked at me as if at a person on the verge of death. Which is how Cynthia says I looked. I spent the rest of the day flat on my back with a high fever, occasionally stumbling out to our lovely latrine. When we finally got ahold of our doctor he gave the go ahead to start taking antibiotics, which worked their magic in a matter of hours. I managed to get up and meet a few more locals over the next two days, and everyone asked if I was acostumbrándome (or getting used to things).

Off to The Future

2006-11-06T07:37:00.000-08:00

We got our site assignment on Friday and found out that we’ll be living in the future or El Porvenir as it’s called here. El Porvenir is located 30 kilometers north of Olmos in the department of Lambayeque , near the border of Piura. It is a tiny farming community – only 420 people, 60 families. It’ll be hot and rainy during the summer (January, February and March) and mild the rest of the year (we hope). Here’s a little bit more about our site:

1. 2 hours north of Chiclayo, the department capital, along the old Panamerican highway.
2. The region grows limes, mangos, passion fruit, paprika peppers. YAY!
3. They raise cows, goats and sheep and some horses (that means we’ll have fresh milk and cheese!!!! Yipeeeeeee!
4. No electricity! A well for water! A latrine! No cell phone signal! One community phone in the town! *sniff*
5. Some of the 420 people are weavers and they make saddle bags, hammocks, bed spreads and rugs. ¡Triple YAY!
6. Lambayeque has impressive archeological sites – Sipán, Sicán, Túcume.
7. Our assignment is described as: Protection and Sustainable Management of the forest (Algarrobo trees).
8. Dan will be working with an Association of beekeepers. Cynthia will be working with a health post.
9. We suspect we will be doing a lot of gardening. ¡Qué suerte!

Tonight we depart for our site visit. We’ll be in Chiclayo until Wednesday and then off to our site to meet our host family and the rest of the community. When we return on Sunday we hope to provide more information. Until then…..

3 weeks done!

2006-10-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

Every day I am still stunned by the mountains that rise dramatically all around us. Before arriving I knew that Peru is a very mountainous country, but I was unsure how dramatic the landscape would be this close to Lima. Today was a gorgeous day with a blue sky and minimal dust and I again noticed how incredible they are.

The mountains are really this close!

Climate-wise, it’s incredibly dry and dusty. The plants and trees are covered with a layer of brown-grey dust. Outside of Lima, where we stayed our first two days, it apparently has rained only once in two years. Where we live now it rains in December – February but it is not celebrated because the rains bring “huaycos” which roughly translate into mudslide, avalanche and flood all rolled into one. Happy happy joy joy. The only defense against the “huaycos” is to run like hell to places they have determined to be safe and huayco-free. Apparently the neighborhood we are in now is in extreme danger in the case of huaycos. Dan & I are fortunate to be leaving here at the end of November so are likely to miss the rains. Sadly our host families have to endure it every year.

Family: We live in Sta. Eulalia about a 10 minute up hill walk from the training center in a big house with the Huaman family. They are really sweet and very hard working. Living in the house are Leonore and Abel and their daughter Mirta, 31 and her daughter Adrianna, 11 months old. There are also two sons that live in the US. The family has a small store in front of their house, similar to a mini-mart, a small pharmacy next to it and a cattle ranch up in the sierra. They also have a few bulls nearby on a property about a 10 minute combi ride from the house. Their backyard is a jungle of fruit baring trees – 2 avocado, banana, stone fruit, apple, and some others. To my great surprise they also have artichoke plants and as it is early spring here, they are baring their flowers. One of their avocado trees is a variety I have never seen before – each avocado must weigh at least 5lbs – they look like a small watermelon. Also in the backyard are two turkeys and a duck --. I call these dinner. Abel has promised Dan that he will teach him how to slaughter a duck – oh boy! I’m really happy he didn’t make me the same offer.

This is where we live!

Our backyard - with Adriana's freshly laundered toys

Food: Almost any volunteer or trainee in Peru will tell you that their host families want to feed them enough every day to last a week. This is a slight exaggeration, but we get very well fed. Breakfast tends to be light. We get little bolitos of bread, with anything from queso fresco (like fresh mozzarella) to avocado (palta in the local idiom) to margarine and home made strawberry jam. Some days our host mom, Leonor, will fry us an egg, more often we get a big cup of avena, a thin hot cereal, heavily sweetened, usually made of quinoa, boiled then ground in a blender, and cooked a little more with milk. Because we requested it early on, we get coffee, in this case instant. Some people make café pasada, filtered coffee that comes out like motor oil, which gets cut with hot milk. We haven’t had the heart to ask this of Leonor because she is so good to us and coffee is clearly not her thing. Lunch is the big meal, and everyone packs in the carbs. White rice is obligatory. Someone asked to not have rice and she got a mountain of pasta in its place. Just eat your rice and be happy about it! This is usually accompanied by some concoction of chicken and vegetables, or chicken and a sauce based on mashed potatoes. Mondays are lentils or beans. The big plate often comes with soup, which often has potatoes involved somehow. Salads are usually cooked vegetables served cold with a dressing of lime juice. People don’t eat many green salads because they have reasonable fear of contamination in the lettuce. Leonor told us that she loves green salads, but she will only eat lettuce that comes from her own terreno, grown with water that she trusts. She served us some last week, and we all reveled in the luxury. Dinner is a smaller rerun of lunch, and only happens on Sunday because we are here. Sunday lunch happens later, and honestly, I could skip dinner along with everyone else, but you just don’t turn down food. One of the cool things about Leonor is that she likes the foods of the sierra, and because she knows that we are interested, she serves them to us. She was visibly tickled that we like choclo, the local large grained corn, and she was pleased and surprised that we liked olluco, an Andean tuber that she served with a tomato based sauce. Those who know and love the avocado tree we lived with in Los Angeles will appreciate her pride and our pleasure at the sight of the enormous ten inch long, two and a half kilo avocados that come off the tree in the back yard. We have been carving off one of these monsters for three days now. Huarochiri is famous for avocados (which I am coming to think of automatically as paltas) and cherimoyas. Life could be worse. Oh yes, one of the assignments for environmental action this week was to sample and report back to the class on sundry Peruvian organic foods. This included a variety of gaot cheeses, and some gaunanbana jam. Don’t cry too hard for us.

Giant avocado next to my small digital camera case - it's hard to tell but this baby it about the size of my head!

Dogs are everywhere in the street. Every morning I pick up a rock or two on my way out the door in case I need to scare off one of the neighborhood four-leggers. Mostly the dogs are just protecting their property, but sometimes they are just being annoyingly aggressive. I’ve taken to carrying around pieces of bread as a peace offering, but when I throw it to them they think it’s a rock and they flee. The other night Dan & I were walking home with a few pieces of cake from a birthday party and encountered an angry dog. Since I was not carrying a rock, I threw a piece of cake at the dog thinking that I could make a friend. The dog, mistaking my act of kindness for an act of aggression, turned quickly and ran in the other direction. Oh well, we didn’t need more cake.

Training-
We are in training from 8am to 5pm (sometimes later) Monday through Friday. On Saturdays we attend a gardening class at La Molina – la Universidad Agrícola in Lima from 7am – 2pm. Sundays are our only full day off. As we mentioned in our last blog, training is really I N T E N S E

The view from Misti

Monday through Friday training is divided mostly between language and technical sessions (either Community Health or Environment)

During 16 hours of language training each week we discuss topics ranging from safety and security, to Peruvian history, our host families and real families. I’ve learned that it’s not wise to take a moto-taxi (even though I find them incredibly cute –smaller than the Rollerskate Festiva that we drove in LA), and when riding in a combi (that’s small bus for you non-pc/Peruvians) it is best to sit in the middle and not at the window – because people might reach into the combi from the outside and steal your bag. Classes are not always at the training center. The other day they sent us out into the streets of Chosica to learn about the upcoming regional elections. They paired us off and gave us two questions to ask anyone on the street. There goes the crazy gringos! My partner & I had to find out the candidates and parties running for election in Lima and Chosica. It was really fun and a good way to learn vocabulary. Of course, people thought we were absolutely insane. A man who ran an internet café took pity on us, and looked up most of the candidates running for mayor for Chosica. Wednesday we went to the market in Chosica to buy ingredients for a group lunch – something typical of Peru and something typical of the US. So what did we come up with? Pizza and Papas a la Huancaina (potatoes with a cream sauce) – it was carb overload! Oh, and then I had the Papas again that evening at a two year old’s birthday party.

Dan & I are having very different experiences with technical training. Each group trains with different APCDs and trainers.

For Community Health training we spend about half the time at the center learning how to facilitate various types of capacity building sessions, tools for community analysis and needs assessment. We also learn about communicable/non-communicable diseases and the most pressing health problems in Peru. The other half of the time we work on our Community Development Activity and Community Contact Experience. Additionally we are assigned to different health centers in the community to work at for 13 hours over the 10 weeks. Our goal is to do some sort of Charla (workshop) on some health related topic. On our first day, four of us arrived at the Centro de Salud in Ricardo Palma (a nearby neighborhood) to meet our contact and see what we could do/learn. The health post workers were all very busy with a campaign to raise awareness of (treatable) Bartonollosis, a mosquito-borne illness that is currently present in Huaochiri, our province. So they loaded about 12 of us into the back of a tiny ambulance and off we went to the plaza in Sta. Eulalia to pass out pamphlets on prevention tactics and do-it-yourself mosquito abatement.

We have also been participating in the national campaign to eradicate Rubella. We learned today that Peru is the last country remaining in South America to eradicate this disease. The campaign started on Sunday, Oct. 1st and continues until November 5th. Their goal is to vaccinate everyone between the ages of 2 and 39. On the first day, a few of us were invited to assist, so off we went (on our only day off!!!) to the health center at 8am. Things didn’t start as early as expected though because the highway between Lima and Chosica was closed for a few hours because of a national car race (think Tour de France but with cars). Several of the health center staff’s arrival was delayed by this closure, so Casey, Brian and I went in search of the perfect cup of coffiee. Except that the perfect cup of coffee does not exist in Ricardo Palma and instead we were left with steaming cups of milk and a teabag of coffee grounds. Oh well, at least the company was great! At about 10am, everyone was gathered and ready to set out into the community. Each of us trainees were assigned to a different nurse and health promoter and driven to different spots around the area to start vaccinating people. I think my greatest accomplishment that day was to entertain the hoards of children that surrounded us. I even made a little friend, a cutie pie named Carla, 6 or 7 years old. She saw some other volunteers on the street the next day and asked them if they knew me! She’s a doll. I also filled out the vaccination cards that each person receives as proof of their vaccination, the serial number of the vaccine and who administered it and on what date. It was really crazy the places we were vaccinating people – not what one would call a sterile environment. First we were on a dusty, unpaved street next to an outdoor food stand, then we set up shop around the corner in a bar, next to drunks and blaring music. From there we continued on into a shanty town neighborhood without proper sanitation or much running water. It really felt like “Hey, I’m in the Peace Corps!” Campaigns like this are really the “take it to the people” type endeavors. I doubt that many of these people would have the time otherwise to get to the health center.

Peru 8 - Community Health Volunteers

In all of our free time (read – not very much), we have been taking Afro-Peruvian dance classes twice a week. Really fun stuff, but more of a performative nature and not the social kind of dances most of us want to learn. Other than that we received 2 vaccines today (Friday) – Rabies and HepB. I’m hoping for no side affect since tomorrow morning we will awake again at 6am to start another long, but pretty cool, day.

Love you guys!
C+D

ps -I´m having difficulty loading pictures, not sure what´s up. If you want to see a few pictures, go to Brian´s Peru blog -the link is on the right of this webpage. His blog is amusing and his descriptions of our experiences are hysterical. [ed.note: problem solved, finally! 1/8/07]

Adios Estado Unidos and Hello Peru!

2006-09-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

For those who are not family and friends, I will not to bore you with too many details about our farewell tour of the Pacific coast of the U.S. If you are family and friends, we probably saw you along the way. It was wonderful to leave the country having received good wishes and embraces from so many dear ones. If we didn’t manage to meet you on our way out, we’re sorry we missed you. We think of you all often, even if you have yet to receive any emails, we miss you, and if you feel like making the trip to visit us we will do our best to make the journey worth it.

Here we are just before leaving Colin and Carol`s house in Corvallis, Oregon with all of our worldly belongings.

We flew from Portland, Oregon on September 10 to Washington D.C. We were able to stay for three days at the home of Cynthia’s cousin Jane Sherbourne and to tour the capital a little. More last minute visits, with friends in the area and with Jane, her husband Bob Van Heuvelen, and their daughter Elizabeth, made this a very full two and a half days. We ran out of the house too fast to write a proper thank you note, so here it is now: Jane, Bob, Elizabeth, you were the best hosts imaginable, and gave us a better look at our nation’s capital than we could have thought possible. Thank you for everything. In Peru or wherever else we end up, our home is yours.

Staging began on Wednesday September 13. Looking up to the top of this page, I find it hard to believe that that is eleven days ago. My sister joked that staging sounded like the Peace Corps was gathering a collection of luggage into a pile in preparation for loading, except of course that the luggage included us. Yes, it was a little like that, but I’m not sure that baggage goes though the emotions we went through. We met the rest of our current group of Peace Corps Trainees, aspiring to be full fledged volunteers. We total thirty eight, aged from 20 to our mid fifties. We come from all parts of the U.S. There are three married couples among us. We can be divided roughly in half by sex, there are a few more women, or by program goals. Twenty of us will work in Community Health, and eighteen in Environmental Education and Action. At the risk of sounding utterly schmaltzy, I can honestly say that I am extremely proud to be part of this eighth group coming to Peru. Our fellow volunteers are a wonderfully capable, energetic, optimistic, adventurous, and knowledgeable group. We are still getting to know each other, but we have great mutual respect and friendship. I could go into too much detail about silly icebreaking exercises, moments of bonding with our fellow aspirantes, last meals in the U.S. (Ethiopian food!), or the very long day of travel from D.C. to Lima, and thence to here. Suffice to say, we got here, with no more drama than a lost bathroom bag. I suppose a separate entry on impressions of Washington and our adventures there might serve, but that all seems like another world, years ago, even though less than two weeks have passed.

The on going emotional theme that began somewhere around the time we got ourselves packed, said goodbye to our apartment and most of our worldly goods, and set out on the road has been the inevitable clash between normal daily life and the fact that our current course in life is not quite normal. While feverishly liquidating our household there wasn’t much time to think about what this was leading to, and once on the road, we have often fallen into our normal rhythms of travel. But the fact is, we have left home, and we aren’t coming back for a while, and we have traveled to a new and distant place, which we will call home for the next two years. Leaving Los Angeles (cue music by X) I got a strong attack of emotional vertigo. For a moment, I felt dizzy as the reality sank in. And then that passed. I wasn’t at the wheel, and no one would have noticed if I hadn’t mentioned it. For Cynthia it didn’t hit until we were near the Oregon border and she realized that she was going North, and wouldn’t go South back to California for a long time.

Heading north, somewhere near the California/Oregon Border

During staging our lead trainer would occasionally mention something that we would discuss in greater detail on Saturday or Sunday. Which of course meant, in Peru. Every now and then Cynthia or I would turn to the other and say with varying degrees of wonder or excitement “We’re going to Peru!” Now we are here, and we have a routine of sorts, but every now and then we find ourselves saying “We’re in Peru!”

The view of Santa Eulalia from our host family`s rooftop

Peru!

2006-05-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

We'll be moving to Peru on Sept. 20th!

This site will help us to record our adventures and communicate with folks back home as we spend 2 years volunteering for Peace Corps.