Callanca

Callanca, Lambayeque, Perú will be my permanent site. Callanca is the community, Lambayeque the department (state). It’s located about 12 hours north of Lima near Chiclayo, the capital of Lambayeque. The population is 1,500.

It will be hot and dry there. For instance this time of year (winter down here) it’s around 80–85 in the daytime, 60–65 at night. I’m near the coast, about half an hour from the beach.

I’ll be working with restaurants, farmers and, believe it or not, ducks. They raise and slaughter and serve a lot of ducks in Callanca. The food is said to be spectacular and pato con arroz, duck over rice, is a specialty as are ceviche (raw fish “cooked” in lime juice) and all varieties of seafood. The waters off the coast of Perú and Ecuador are some of the best fishing grounds in the world.

I’m visiting the site this week with four other volunteers who’ll be working in other parts of Lambayeque. We’ll stay a week and get to know our host families (all volunteers live with Peruvian families) and our work counterparts, Peruvians who’ll be introducing us to local officials and keeping us from making total fools of ourselves (we hope).

However, the Peace Corps has managed to make my placement a bit more remarkable than it otherwise would have been. On Friday they booted one of the volunteers that would’ve been working with me in Lambayeque for being “immature, culturally insensitive and a behavioral risk.” They sent him home. And to make matters worse, he had a girlfriend with whom he’d hooked up here in Perú and in protest she has decided to leave as well. She was supposed to have served in Monsefú, a community about 10 kilometers from my site. Like me, she was a small–business development volunteer and so we likely would have been working quite closely on multiple projects.

So now it’s hard to say whether I’ll be asked to take over her site, work in both sites or continue working only in Callanca. Monsfú is the municipalidad of the district and a city of 30,000 people so clearly my work would be cut out for me were Monsefú to be included in my area of responsibility. It’s also possible that they’ll move a volunteer from one of the other departments to Monsefú or that they’ll decide not to assign Monsefú a volunteer and wait for the next group of small-business volunteers to be trained next summer and then assign a volunteer to Monsefú.

So the suspense isn’t over. I’m still not altogether sure where I’ll be working or what I’ll be doing. But at least for the next week my site is Callanca and I’m giving my full attention to ducks and restaurants specializing in duck.

Here’s a link to a YouTube video about Lambayeque.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sOmQSCxxlo