Merry Christmas from Callanca

A Hall of Mirrors in a House of Cards

About two weeks ago, the engineer in charge of a water project in Rama Guzmán (a sector of Callanca), the treasurer of the water committee (the group of residents responsible for the project—president, treasurer, secretary) and I went to the office of the Alcaldesa, my buddy Rita, to ask the Municipalidad to help Rama Guzmán with a big problem that had arisen with the water project. The dumbfuck engineer had not measured the voltage at the site of the well and it turned out that because of the poor condition of the electrical lines in Rama Guzmán only 110 volts of the 220 volts necessary in these parts was arriving to the site of the well and the electric pump installed therein. Rita listened to our story but seemed altogether unsympathetic. She said that she would look into the possibility of having ElectroNorte, the electric company, correct the problem. Don’t call me, I’ll call you, in other words. At this meeting I happened to hear Rita say that tomorrow she’d be in a caserío called Pómape to participate in the celebration of their anniversary.

A few days earlier a couple of friends had invited me to Pómape, the same celebration. The night before the anniversary they called to remind me. We in fact went to Pómape, but just to hang out and see what the celebration of the anniversary of the caserío was like. When Rita showed up she invited me to join the dignitaries on the dias. She then invited me to lunch there at the celebration—they’d set up some temporary structures housing restaurants. The pepian de pato was first-rate, by the way. During lunch I decided what the fuck, and asked Rita if she’d thought any more about that electrical problem in Rama Guzmán. To my surprise, she said no problem, she could take care of it right away “con un documento.” That means, if you write an oficio soliciting my assistance and deliver it to my office on Monday or Friday, the days when I attend the public, I can help you.

I reported this the next day to the engineer, the president and secretary of the water committee, and the teniente gobernadora, a State official who’s supposed to look out for the interests of the sectors in which she lives. The secretary and the teniente seemed to take me seriously, the president and the engineer couldn’t have cared less. That’s when I began to sense where the lines were drawn in this battle.

The teniente wrote the oficio, I typed it up on my laptop and printed it in Chiclayo. I came back late from Chiclayo and really didn’t feel like doing anything else that day but in spite of that fact I rode my bike to Rama Guzmán and asked the teniente to sign it. It was fortunate that I did. While I was at the house of the teniente, the secretary of the water committee showed up. She said that the entire committee was meeting at that very moment in the house of the treasurer. A perfect chance to get everybody to sign at once so that we could deliver the document to Rita the following Monday.

I took the document to the treasurer’s house. There, the committee and the engineer were in the process of signing paperwork that would terminate the project, that is declare it to be successfully completed. This seemed odd to me in light of the fact that there was no electricity to run the pump but I figured what the hell, this is probably just a paperwork thing and they’re going to sign the papers but keep working on the electrical problem until it was fized. So I asked everybody to sign the oficio so that I could take it to Rita on Monday.

The treasurer looked it over and signed. The secretary, too. The president looked it over, shrugged, and handed it to the engineer—but without signing. The engineer looked it over and seemed concerned. The “asunto” of the oficio was this: “Se solicita apoyo para culminación del proyecto del pozo artesiano del Sector Rama Guzmán.” (“Seeking assistance for the completion of well project in Rama Guzmán.”) The engineer wasn’t on board with that wording. It indicated that the project was not complete and he and the president and treasurer were insisting that the project was indeed complete. Their responsibilities were at an end and it was up to somebody else to fix whatever problems remained.

The engineer and president refused to sign the document without a change to the “asunto.” They concocted a new one on the spot and scribbled it onto the document I’d spent two days getting written, typed and printed. They wanted it to read: “se solicita apoyo para funcionamiento del pozo artesiano del Sector Rama Guzmán.” (“Seeking assistance to allow the proper functioning of the well…”) They also redacted the body of the oficio where it referred to “culminación del proyecto.” While they finished their meeting I took the document to an internet cabinas nearby (I didn’t have my laptop with me) and the kid in charge laboriously typed the new document from scratch. It took about an hour due to interruptions, customers arriving and leaving. But because the kid obviously understood as he typed the document that I was helping out Rama Guzmán he only charged me for printing the document, a few céntimos to cover the cost of the ink.

It was getting dark and the meeting was breaking up when I got back to the treasuer’s house. But before they left everybody signed the document. The teniente, the secretary and I talked outside the treasurer’s house. That was when I found out that the engineer had failed to complete a great deal of work on the project. I wrote down everything they told me and later typed up and printed a list.

Basically, what the list said was this: besides the obvious and glaring problem of the absence of electricity, the engineer only had run pipe to the “caja” of each family included in the project (to the box similar to what we have in our yards in the U.S., a valve that allows you turn on and off the water supply for the entire house). They were supposed to install “caños” (a spigot or standpipe) and “tubería domiciliaria” (an indoor pipe to the kitchen or bathroom) in each house. The engineer was also supposed to have provided “capacitaciones” on how to care for the well and the pump and how to treat the drinking water with chlorine. Instead his assistant had collected signatures under false pretenses indicating that pobladores had attended these sessions and the engineer had charged the project for having supposedly taught the workshops. Furthermore, three thousand soles had disappeared from the bank account. (Later the treasurer admitted that he’d taken a “loan” from the account.) The engineer had installed a small provisional pump in the well that would run on 110 volts but had never even tested the larger pump, the pump that would run the system once an adecuate source of electricity was available. The provisional pump was running off a wire that the engineer had spliced into the electrical line of the resident nearest the well. There was no meter measuring how much energy the pump was burning. The unfortunate resident was going to receive an electric bill of 200 soles instead of 20 the following month. Materials left over from the project had disappeared without explanation. The engineer had all the seals (stamps that Peruvians affix alongside their signatures when they sign official documents) in a plastic bag in his briefcase and wouldn’t let the members of the water committee sign any document without his approval. And, finally, the engineer refused to turn over to the secretary or the teniente gobernadora the “expediente” (project plan) that would have allowed them to verify that all of the missing elements I’ve mentioned had in fact been promised in the project.

A bit of corruption perhaps? Let’s say that yes, there was a good possibility of that. The following Monday, the secretary of the water committee, the teniente gobernadora and I paid a visit to the mayor’s office in Monsefú, the District captial. We brought with us two letters, the original oficio that stated that the project was not completed, signed by me, the teniente and the secretary (“Secretaria del ORNE” handwritten under the signature since engineer had the secretary’s seal in a plastic bag in his briefcase) along with the redacted version of the letter signed and sealed by the entire committee plus the teniente and me. We also brought with us my typed list of the unmet provisions of the project.

I had no idea how the Alcaldesa would react to this. Corruption being rampant in Perú, for all I knew the Alcaldesa was in for her cut of embezzled funds from the project.

She looked over all the paperwork. Fortunately, I’d brought with me our original letter, all the redactions insisted upon by the engineer and the president of the water committee scribbled in the margins, all references to the incomplete status of the project crossed out or written over. This document seemed to impress the Alcaldesa. I had to keep reminding myself that the purpose of the letter was to petition for an adecuate supply of electricity to the well and pump. Justice in the form of some type of reprimand or denunciation of the crooks would’ve been gravy but that wasn’t really what we were there for. The Alcaldesa said that she’d speak personally to ElectroNorte and write a letter asking them to fix the electrical problem. She kept a copy of the list of complaints and also kept the redacted letter. We told her that a meeting had been scheduled for a week from today by the president and the engineer; they were going to close the project at that meeting. The Alcaldesa said not to worry, she’d call in the engineer for a little chat well before the meeting.

Verónica, the secretary of the water committee, is a woman I work with frequently on many projects. She’s honest, trustworthy and tireless in her efforts to improve conditions in a community that often doesn’t give much of a shit whether its conditions improve or not. There are many reasons for this, among them poor education and the fact that everybody has to work 24 hours a day in order to eat and can’t concentrate on much of anything else. At any rate, I check in with Verónica several times a week at her house in Rama Guzmán because she never has any saldo on her cellphone to call me when there’s a problem with some project. And there’s always a problem with some project. On the Thursday following our Monday morning meeting with the mayor, I rode my bike to Vero’s house in Rama Guzmán. She wasn’t home so I rode to her grandmother’s house and found her there sorting freshly picked basil with her relatives. “Ai, don Carlos,” she said, “se armó un gran lío.” There’s a big mess.

Verónica and her son, Andy.

The Regidor (city councilman) from Callanca, who’d also been present at the meeting with the Alcaldesa, had called the engineer and told him that we’d come to Rita’s office to spill the beans. So now we knew that the Regidor was probably in on the graft. After hearing about our denunciations, the president of the water committee had gone to Verónica’s house and when he didn’t find Vero at home had thrown a shit fit in the presence of her husband, accusing Vero of “andando con el gringo” (running around with the gringo, me) and accusing Vero’s husband Pablo of having a woman on the side and in short engaging in the strategy preferred by all crooks—the best defense is a good offense. If your own character is under assault, attack the character of your accusers. Furthermore, the engineer and the president and the treasurer had moved up the date of the meeting to close the project. It was now scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.

Coincidentally, I had another meeting with the Alcaldesa scheduled for the following morning. I was going to accompany the teniente gobernador of another sector, Rama Alicán, to the mayor’s office to ask for repairs to the road. The road entering Alicán was so bad that no motos wanted to carry passengers there. The teniente and I waited an hour or so and the Alcaldesa called us in. Engineers employed by the Municipalidad joined us and we agreed upon a plan to repair the road. I then took advantage of the opportunity to inform Rita about the meeting scheduled for that afternoon and again showed her the list of unmet provisions for the project. She asked why nobody had invited her to the meeting. “No quieren que venga,” I said. Because they don’t want you there. That was all Rita needed to hear. She said she’d see me at meeting.

The meeting was scheduled for three o’clock, I showed up at 3:45 and people were just starting to arrive. Verónica and Roxana, the teniente gobernadora, were there, also the engineer and his assistant, the president of the water committee and the treasurer, plus, by 4:15, about 50 residents of Rama Guzmán. They called the Regidor. He’d forgotten about the meeting. He was on his way, he said. At around 4:30 the meeting started. The Regidor had arrived by then. Rita, the Alcaldesa, never shows up until there’s a full house so I was expecting her in 15 minutes or a half-hour. Meanwhile, the president of the water committee did his tapdance. He said what a wonderful day was today, a glorious project now complete, all promises fulfilled, all beneficiaries content. It sounded like one of Fidel Castro’s May-Day speeches in La Plaza de la Revolución in Havanna. Maybe not quite that long. The president said how proud he was of having participated in the project although he’d received nothing in return and had paid without complaint his taxi fares and other out-of-pocket expenses without seeking reimbursements from the project budget. He told a touching story of how he’d once found 50 soles in the street. His companion had told him that such are the gifts that Heaven bestows upon deserving and selfless individuals.

I suppressed an urge to puke.

The Alcaldesa showed up during the treasurer’s speech. He was explaining the 3000 soles the project had loaned him and swearing that he had bank vouchers indicating the monthly payments he’d made to date. He shut up when the Alcaldesa arrived. Everyone exchanged greeting and then it was the engineer’s turn to explain the costs of the project. They’d prepared a couple of “papelotes”—throwaway paper posters—with all the major categories of credits and debits printed on them in Magic Marker. It came as no surprise to me that they’d spent almost all the money in the budget. Of 90,000 soles less than 2,000 remained. The engineer talked about how they’d gone above and beyond the call of duty in the project, digging to 12 meters instead of the projected 10 meters to find water, installing pipe of ¾” instead of ½” when required, borrowing a ½-horsepower pump from the Regidor to fill the tanks at the well site when they discovered that there wasn’t enough power to run a 1-horsepower pump. He insisted that people misunderstood the scope of the project and were expecting spigots and indoor plumbing when the project didn’t call for these measures.

The meeting.

The Alcaldesa asked a few questions during the presentation but waited to speak until the engineer had finished. She asked if the engineer thought that FONCODES, the firm sponsoring the project, would allow the community to keep the 1,900 soles remaining in the budget and the engineer thought yes, that they would. At that moment I thought we were done for. It didn’t seem as if the Alcaldesa was going to mention any of unmet provisions of the project included in the list we’d given her on Monday. She was going to ask for the 2,000 measly soles leftover from the project and that was it. I thought that surely the Alcaldesa must be in on swindle along with the Regidor, the engineer, the president and the treasurer.

“And if they’ll let the community keep that money,” said the Alcaldesa, “then surely they’ll provide…” and she pulled our list out of a folder on her lap. “…standpipes for all the beneficiaries?...plumbing to a designated area of each household?” And she read off each of our complaints in order and waited for the engineer to reply. He agreed to every one. What else could he do?

In Perú nobody ever really accuses anyone directly of misconduct, they’re very genteel. If the Watergate hearings had occurred in Perú, the interrogators of the White House staff would have said things like, “while I respect greatly the contributions of the Republican Party in furthering the ideals of democracy over the course of our nation’s history, I regret that some individuals in government may have overstepped the boundaries established by the rights and duties of their offices and the in the process of doing so harmed certain institutions of our government, what, sir, is your opinion on this matter?” What Rita had just done was as much of a slam-dunk-in-your-face insult as you’ll ever encounter in Perú. She thanked us—the teniente, the secretary and I—for having brought certain outstanding problems to her attention and made sure that the residents of Rama Guzmán left with the impression that she, the Alcaldesa, had secured all of these additional benefits for them of her own goodwill and voition and not because they were stated provisions of the project and it was her obligation to do so. In that respect politicians in Perú differ not at all from U.S. politicians.

The atmosphere as the meeting broke up was anything but tense or hostile. The engineer and his cohorts weren’t smiling but they weren’t pouting, either. I and the teniente and the secretary were smiling but we weren’t gloating. None of us was sure what would transpire in the weeks to come. In Perú it’s dangerous to claim victory too soon. In Perú it’s dangerous to claim victory ever. That, I think, is why everyone is so indirect in their comments about individuals or situations. We’re supposed to go to FONCODES this week and arrange the details of the culmination of the project. But nobody’s taking anything for granted, neither the apparent winners nor the apparent losers. We all know that everything can change at any time and based upon any whim of any official involved. Such is the hall of mirrors inside a house of cards that’s the political and institutional environment of Perú.

Giving Up is Only the First Step

A year ago when I arrived in Callanca I asked at the health post if there existed any record of the number of diabetics living in Callanca. I wanted to offer some classes on how to manage the disease. Needless to say no such records existed. In fact the health post didn’t even own a glucose monitor so there was no way to screen pregnant women for gestational diabetes or older, overweight patients for Type II diabetes. A related problem had been proven to exist without doubt. The health post was open only from 8 A.M. to 1 P.M. six days a week. It offered no laboratory facilities or services or testing equipment more sophisticated than a scales and blood-pressure sleeve. The post was tiny. It had been built in the 1980s to serve 2,000 people and was now attempting to serve 6,000. So Gisela, the obstetrician, convinced me to triage the diabetes education classes and help her in her efforts to expand the health post. Sure, why not?

Gisela assured me that preparations for the expansion were well underway. A year ago she’d met with an NGO in Chiclayo and the NGO had offered the services of an engineer who’d come to Callanca to survey the land on which the expansion would take place and to draw up plans. Gisela brought out a thick file folder. It contained papers that addressed the issue of a donation of land for the expansion of the health post. The donated land consisted of a small parcel in back of the existing health post. We looked out the back window at it, an even, rocky, barren strip of earth about the size of two tennis courts with carizo (cane-like weeds) five feet high growing in the strip nearest the building where it received enough shade to survive. It looked like a quarter-acre of Hiroshima from the year 1946. No wonder somebody donated this, I remember thinking, who would want it and of what use could it possibly be to anyone besides the posta?

But in Callanca that’s a dangerous question to ask about any piece of land. Here nobody gives away land. Not for a park, not for a market, not for a school, not even the four or five square meters it takes to accommodate a well that would provide water for maybe 60 or 80 families. And not for a health post, either, I was about to find out.

Gisela extracted papers from the file folder and told me that the land in back of the health post had in fact been donated by the legal owners, a family named Gonzales. A thick sheaf of papers that included photocopied identification cards, signatures and fingerprints indicated that the donation had been made four years ago. So why was the health post still the size of a Seven-Eleven store and keeping the hours of an antique shop in Monson, Maine? There’d been a dispute over ownership of the donated land, Gisela admitted. Even though the title to the land was registered to the Gonzales, another family had disputed the donation. They said that the property was actually theirs and that the Gonzales had stolen it from them twenty years ago when the Municipalidad had first sent representatives to Callanca to take a census and register property ownership.

Two years ago representatives of the families had signed an “acta,” a copy of which Gisela extracted from her folder. The acta stipulated that the families would be paid 2,000 soles each to stop bickering and agree to the donation. The Gonzales were willing to donate outright but since the other family—a family that didn’t even officially own the land—was demanding money, they wanted money, too. The posta had never paid the 4,000 soles. So even though the land had been “donated” both by the family that owned it and by the family that didn’t own it, the health post was unable to do anything with the land because of “those people,” Gisela said, and nodded in a direction that indicated I was supposed to know of whom she was speaking. Who are “those people” I finally had to ask.

“Los Campos,” she whispered, and nodded in the same direction. Los Campos? But the Campos were my host family, the family in Callanca with which I was living. Their house was located next-door to the health post. My host family was singlehandedly preventing the expansion of the health post..

Slowly but surely, over the course of nearly a year, this revelation would give rise to a series of discoveries and related events that could only have taken place in Perú. First, Gisela returned to the NGO that had been willing to sponsor the renovation two years ago. Needless to say they’d long ago spent those funds on other projects and couldn’t promise more funding in the forseeable future. Next, Gisela consulted the legal advisor for the Ministry of Health in Chiclayo. The lawyer looked over the paperwork and said that the donation was still valid, however no organization either public or private was going to fund the renovation unless we settled the dispute between the legal owners of the property and the supposed owners—my host family. Gisela didn’t want any part of this negotiation. It was up to me.

I’ve finally been able to work out a mutually satisfactory, even cordial relationship with my host family. But during the period of which we’re speaking conditions were much less than cordial and far from satisfactory. When I broached the subject with César and Margot they insisted that the land belonged to the heirs of César’s late aunt, Micalea Campos, and that the family in whose name the title was registered had stolen the land and sereptitiously registered the title without the Campos’ consent or knowledge. When I pointed out that an agreement to donate the land would benefit the entire community Margot asked what the community had ever done for them and what benefits could they expect? She unleashed a screed on the subject of their financial problems, how badly they needed money to pay off their loans, how César’s mother Natividad was ill and bedridden and who in the community was thinking about her or her welfare? I knew that César’s mother and father were actually very well off and regularly hosted weddings and birthday parties at their house that had to be costing them hundreds or thousands of soles. But of course I kept quiet about this and let Margot keep talking. The people who do the most talking in a disgreement eventually end up saying something that compromises their own position. This Margot did. She said that the only reason the Campos were demanding money was because the other family, the Gonzales, were demanding money as well and if the wrongful owners were going to benefit from the transfer of the land then so were the rightful owners. I pounced on this opportunity. I knew that the Gonzales weren’t asking for a penny. The only reason they’d ever been offered money was because the Campos had demanded money and they and the NGO who’d tried to resolve the dispute two years before had thought it fair to offer money to both parties. So if the Gonzales were willing to donate outright then so were the Campos?, I asked. Either because she thought the Gonzales would be unwilling to donate or because she’d painted herself into a corner, Margot somewhat hesitantly agreed and César concurred. I settled for this shaky commitment, returned to speak with the Gonzales and confirmed their willingness to donate and, over the course of the next few weeks and months, spoke to my family about the donation as if it were a done deal. Gradually they seemed to resign themselves to the idea. Possibly they realized how bad they would look in the community if they and they alone were holding up the expansion of the health post.

During those months several events beyond our control occurred. Elections were held and the change of leadearship meant that many functionaries at all levels of government changed, including the legal advisor at the Ministry of Health. The previous advisor had been extremely helpful and interested in our situation and his specialty had been property rights. The new advisor didn’t seem particularly concerned about us and her specialty was contract law. So we found ourselves severely deficient in that critical area of support. Also Sebastiana Gonzales, the Gonzales in whose name the donated property was registered, died suddenly. According to some of the legal experts whose advice we sought, this meant that a description of the property and a notification of its change in ownership had to be published in the newspaper so that any heirs to the property other than the sons of Sebastiana could come forward and state a claim. This would not only delay the donation but would result in costs that the health post couldn’t afford and that the heirs to the property would be unlikely to want to incur. Also the doctor in charge of the health post quit and a new doctor was assigned to replace her. The departing doctor took with her the health post’s only copy of the plans drawn up by the NGO four years previously.

But problems beyond our control appeared to be the least of our worries. Plenty of problems that had been completely under the control of the health post also existed. They easily could have followed through with the stipulations of the acta consenting to the donation two years ago when the NGO had been willing to pay both parties. They could have taken advantage of the recent willingness of the Campos to agree to the donation and could have signed a new acta while Sebastiana was still alive. They could’ve made more than one copy of the plans. But they didn’t and so we began to explore other options.

In the course of exploring these options we found out that there was one other small detail that the health post had never gotten around to attending to. It turned out that the title to the land on which the existing health post had been built had never been publicly registered following its donation twenty years ago. In short, nobody legally owned any of the land that the current much less the future health post occupied or might eventually occupy. The health post was essentially a publicly funded squatter.

We sorted all this out with an attorney. The cost of registering all the land and wiping up all the legal nastiness involved in establishing legitimate ownership would come to 2000 soles, the land on which the current posta had been built could be registered immediately but the land slated for the expansion would take more time. The cost of surveying the land and drawing up a plan would come to 4000 soles. We would need to construct a fence around the property to be donated and hang up a sign declaring the land to be the property of the health post and the site of the future construction of an addition. This would cost several hundred more soles. It all seemed pretty much impossible so nobody did anything for several months.

But in Perú (if not everywhere), giving up is only the first step.

The new doctor—though of course it took her some weeks to get accustomed to her new job—turned out to be willing to devote the time and attention it deserved to the process of clearing the title to all the property. And an unexpected ally, someone who’d been working on the expansion of the health post long before I arrived in Callanca, came to our aid.

Aldo Rodríguez was a callancano I’d worked with on various other projects—the artisans’ association, agricultural projects and the establishment of a municipalidad in Callanca. He knew about the legal stipulations requiring us to fence in the land and post an official notice. Some months previously he’d been about to begin that work when I told him about the disputed ownership of the property on which the expansion would take place. He lost interest at that point but now he’d returned to speak with the doctor and understood better all the implications of the legal procedures pending. He had a friend, an engineer, who’d be willing to survey the land and draw up a plan for free. The engineer was used to working with the public registry of deeds and titles and volunteered to do the investigation necessary at no cost. He believed that he could clear the titles without the help of the expensive attorney.

So with these processes underway, it was again up to me to drag my host family along for the ride. Aldo scheduled a meeting at the posta to sign the acta that would make official the donation of the land for the expansion. All I had to do was get my host family to show up and sign.

Everything in Perú requires a document. Aldo delayed in writing and printing the document inviting all the interested parties and witnesses to the meeting until the day before the meeting would take place. Late in the afternoon on the day before the meeting he brought me invitations for César and Margot and for Macedonio, César’s father. I left a copy with César and Margot and at dusk rode my bike to Macedonio’s house out in the fields north of Callanca.

Macedonio greeted me warmly. Macedonio always greets me warmly in spite of the fact that he probably has about as much use for a gringo as he does for a subscription to GQ. He respects me because he knows why I’ve come to Callanca and sees that I haven’t shown up for a week or a month and then headed back to Lima or Chiclayo as have so many other so-called friends of Callanca over the years. Though an octogenerian and a little hard of hearing, Macedonio can still dance till dawn at a matrimonio and consume liters of beer and chicha as he does so. His wife Natividad is confined to a wheelchair after surviving stomach cancer and the requisite treatments. Both she and Macedonio were still plenty sharp enough, I’m sure, to guess the reason for my visit. I explained that the posta was finally ready to begin preparations for the expansion and showed Macedonio the invitation. He thought it was a paper that I wanted him to sign but I repeated that it was merely an invitation. He handed it to his daughter María who read it, confirmed its nature and pointed out to Macedonio that the signing would take place tomorrow. María clearly wasn’t happy with this development. Her late mother was Micaela, the alleged owner of the disputed property. Later I understood that there was another reason why María seemed unhappy. For some reason Aldo, when he’d written the invitation, had included a paragraph thanking the Gonzales family for donating the land but making no mention whatsover of the Campos. Since I hadn’t had time to read the invitation before delivering it I didn’t find this out until later that night.

In spite of the lateness of the invitation and the undiplomatic wording of the document, the Campos, represented by César and Macedonio, showed up on time for the meeting the next day. On time meaning on Peruvian time, an hour or so late. Aldo was there, and of course the doctor and Gisela, as well as three witnesses and the Teniente Gobernador, an appointed official of the Peruvian government living and working in Callanca. The only person who hadn’t shown up was Benjamín, the representative of the Gonzales family. Aldo had invited him and he’d said that he’d be there. Aldo rode his bike to Benjamín’s house and returned. He wasn’t at home. He was in Chiclayo. We couldn’t call him because his cellphone was “malogrado”—yestereday he’d dropped it in an irrigation ditch.

The Campos suggested that while we waited we should go out back and indicate the boundaries of the donated property as defined by the plans the engineer had drawn up. This we did and the Campos seemed satisfied with the limits of the property. When we returned to the posta Aldo went again to look for Benjamín and came back accompanied by the Gonzales’ representative. Benjamín had arrived while we were out back defining the property lines and had thought that nobody had shown up for the meeting.

It was time to compose and sign the acta. In Perú “palabras” are necessary at a time like this. Everyone in the room who has taken part in the process says a few words to mark the occasion, restate the history of the action to be described in the acta, and thank the parties in attendance. The doctor, Aldo, Benjamín, César and I spoke while Gisela wrote the acta, which briefly stated the minutes of the day’s activities and alluded to the agreement between the Campos and the Gonzales. We passed around the libro de actas, a book of the official minutes of all past meetings organized by the posta, and each person signed the acta. All seemed relieved and in good spirits. So much so that César suggested that we immediately return to the donated land and stake off the property lines. Aldo, God bless him, had brought in his book bag not only the tape measure we’d used to measure the property but also the stakes and twine we’d need to stake off the boundaries.

It took about an hour to remeasure dimensions and drive the stakes. I shot some photos to commemorate the occasion. By then it was getting dark. We shook hands or kissed cheeks and said good-bye.

And that’s as unequivocally successful a termination to a project as one could ever hope to achieve in Perú, where equivocation is the very definition of the path to success and where giving up is but the first step in finding that path.

La Municipalidad de Callanca

Something pretty earth-shaking took place in Callanca on September 26. A letter arrived from the Provincial Government announcing that it was ordering elections to be held in Callanca for a mayor and city council. That means that Callanca will be metamorphizing from a Centro Poblado into a Municipalidad.

It’s hard to explain to an American what that actually means since there are no Municipalidades in America. Or it would better to say that everyplace is a Municipalidad in the U.S. Even the tiniest towns have a mayor and some form of town government. It’s not that way in Perú. Most towns are very small caseríos with little or nothing in the way of what we would call a government., sometimes not even a school. They depend entirely on the Distrito, which is sort of like what we’d call a very small county in the U.S. I’m not sure what the official definition of a caserío is, but judging from the ones I’ve seen I’d say it’s a community of fewer than 1,000. Communites slightly larger qualify as Centro Poblados. Most Centro Poblados are also dependent on the government and budget of their Distrito and don’t have a mayor (alcalde), city council (regidores) or courthouse (municipio), police station (comisaría), park (plaza) or much of anything else of their own. They’re sort of like a neighborhood within a city: an identifiable entity, often with its own name, but with no autonomy of any kind.

The caseríos and centro poblados are sort of like satellites of a larger city that’s a Municipalidad Distrital or Distrito or, in English, obviously, “district.”

In Perú they divide up geography and to some extent government in this way: Departamento (think “state”), Province (a concept that doesn’t exist in the U.S. but imagine Northern California and Southern California with their own independent governments), Distrito (something like “county”), Centro Poblado (maybe “township” would be close) and Caserío (Podunk or Wide Place in the Road). In terms of government as opposed to geography those last three are often lumped together as a Distrito (“district”), a largish city of maybe 30,000, one or two Centro Poblados of 1–5,000 people and several tiny caseríos. But if a Centro Poblado has enough population and independence it can solicit from its Provincial Government and District Government permission to become its own Municipalidad and elect its own officials and begin to take charge of its own institutions—schools, police, sanitation, etc. “Municipalidad” is a term that exists solely at the level of government, not as a geographical term. That is, Monsefú (our Distrito) is both a Distrito and a Municipalidad; Callanca will be both a Centro Poblado and a Municipalidad. “Municipalidad” indicates the presence of a government, a mayor and a council. So Callanca will be what’s called a Municipalidad de Centro Poblado. One day, if it acquires the requisite institutions and services, it can become its own Distrito. But first things first.

In order to hold elections we have to register everyone over 18 to vote. This is no simple task. Here one’s vote is a much more important right and duty than in the U.S., where we offer people the opportunity to register to vote and if you don’t register, tough luck, you don’t vote and that’s your loss. But in Perú you get fined if you don’t vote and the goal is to achieve 100% participation the process. There’s even a line about voting in the national anthem, “y antes niegue sus luces el sol, que faltemos el voto solemne.” The sun will give up its right to shine before we give up our right to vote. This makes the job of registering voters a lot more difficult. We have to go door to door and write down the names of everyone in the house eighteen or older and their DNI, national identification-card number. This is exactly as difficult as it sounds and as difficult as it would be in your town were you required to go door to door and write down everyone’s name and social security number. What are the odds that they’ll all be home at the same time or that the ones at home will know the SS#s of those who aren’t at home? So we leave a blank form and ask people to write down names and DNIs and we come back a day or two later and pick up the forms. When we finish with a house we put a sticker on the door, “casa empadronada.”

This would be slow and tedious but not impossible in a town of 5,000 in the U.S. We’d divide up streets and neighborhoods among the available election workers, hand out the forms, pick up the forms and cross the addresses off our list. But this is Perú. In Callanca there are no street names, much less house numbers. The election workers forget to take tape or stickers with them and so don’t mark the houses that have been empadronado, they fill in the names of the people in the houses but don’t write down their DNI, they skip houses, they don’t empadronar houses in order, they forget in which houses they left blank forms and so never go back to pick them up, they write down names and DNIs of people under 18 years of age, and they generally advance a process that’s a textbook example of entropy if not outright chaos.

Since other Centro Poblados in Perú have achieved Municipalidad status, I’m assuming we’ll somehow get through this registration ordeal. Here things frequently work out in unexpected ways. A few weeks or months from now someone might say, “Oh yeah, I forgot, we can ask the government for a list of the DNIs of everybody in Callanca.” Things have to work out in unexpected ways because expectations as we know them are few and far between. Planning just does not happen here. Other volunteers have told me that it’s a product of our educations that we’re able to imagine outcomes abstractly and to have faith in those abstractions. “This is a design for a business card. It will cost you 50 soles to print 500 of these. If you print the business card and hand it out to potential customers, some of them will call you back and order artesanía because they will remember meeting you and seeing the quality of your artesanía and the picture on the card will remind them of you and your products and the list of services printed on the card will remind them of the kinds of artesanía you produce. If you get even one order thanks to the cards, the income from that order will pay for printing the cards. So print the cards!” That argument makes sense to us. We can imagine the steps involved and we see the business cards as a wise investment. We’ve also seen business cards and other forms of promotion work for other people. But often people in Callanca, because they only may have finished second or third grade, don’t have much confidence in predictions. They would rather spend the 50 soles on materials and buy enough materials to produce 200 soles worth of artesanía that they can sell right now instead of spending the 50 soles on business cards and generating potentially thousands of soles worth of income in the long term. When we were petitioning for the Municipalidad, a woman in Chiclayo who runs a major tour company and who was helping us with the campaign for a Municipalidad actually put forth the proposition that we should be able to collect 4,000 signatures in a week. Clearly she was not envisioning the steps in the process. After a month of work we managed to collect fewer than 500 signatures. And then it turned out that we didn’t need the signatures anyway, the Municipalidad was approved without the submission of any petitions.

A recently formed Municpalidad de Centro Poblado near Callanca, Pampa Grande, also a community of 5,000 people, took three months to complete its voter registration and about 1,300 of the 2,500 or so eligible voters managed to register and vote in their elections. So I’m expecting a similar result here in Callanca.

In spite of the headaches, I’m proud to have been a part of the process of forming the Municipalidad. It’s something that nearly everyone in Callanca wants and has wanted for years. My counterparts in the community understand the legal ins and outs of the formation of the Municipalidad much better than I do and so they did the great majority of the work in petitioning for the Municipalidad. At the same time I made significant contributions to the project, including carrying the paperwork to the Municipalidad Distrital and presenting it to the Alcaldesa and participating in the meeting with the Alcaldesa that led to her eventually approving the formation of the Municipalidad de Callanca. I’d been in many such meetings where unlimited promises were made and zero results ensued (and we gringos are good at imagining disappointing outcomes as well as profitable ones) so it was I who thought to ask for a document at the end of the meeting, a document expressly stating that the District was recommending that the process of forming a Municipalidad de Callanca move forward. This, according to the Peace Corps Handbook, is how Peace Corps is supposed to work. The needs arise from the community and the community—with the volunteer working alongside them and pestering them and complaining and warning them about the terrible things that are going to happen if they fail to plan well—satisfies its own needs. That way when the volunteer leaves the needs of the community can continue to be met and the voice of Carlitos—complaining and pestering and warning and saying if you don’t plan well terrible things are going to happen to you—stays with them forever. For better or for worse.

We Won! Now What?

So we won the business-plan competition in Lima and I’m now a poultry magnate. Or at least I’m the business consultant for a group of poultry magnates. The business plan for Patos Callancanos, Tradición Peruana, our duck-raising enterprise from Callanca, won first prize at the entrepreneurship competition sponsored by Peace Corps in Lima in August and will receive start-up funds of 5,500 soles ($2000) to help initiate the business.

Jesús and Erick, the two young men who went with me to Lima and who presented the plan, looked consummately professional—much better than I did, as a matter of fact—and represented the plan accordingly. I spoke with the judges afterward and they thought our plan was outstanding and even offered to provide counsel in the future should we need it as we begin our enterprise. And considering what I personally know about raising ducks, I guarantee that we’re going to need it.

So even though I bitched and moaned from beginning to end about this project, it will likely change forever the lives of the participants from Callanca, so who can complain in good conscience even for one minute in light that?

Nineteen groups prsented business plans and two earned first prizes, two second prizes and two third prizes. Among the other prize winners were a guinea–pig raising operation (as I’ve mentioned many times, they eat them here), a business selling artesanía and T-shirts, a producer of natural candies and an organic-fertiizer producer.

Now we have to go back to Callanca and actually start the business. This could be challenging. One member of our team will be studying to take the university entrance exam to study nursing. Another team member is a law student. Can you imagine being a law student in the U.S. and raising poultry on the side? I can’t. The third team member, Erick, is 100% on-board and available. He may be the one who actually does all the work. But money is a strong motivator and maybe with 5,500 soles on the line, everybody will come around.

Callanca as a community is delighted and since this is a tangible achievement it makes me look very good indeed. Later, people may start coming to me to ask why they weren’t included in the project, why one of their children can’t join the project (now that the money has arrived), why I didn’t do anything for them or for their families, etc. But for now I can enjoy our accomplishment and rest for awhile. Judith is visiting from the U.S. and we’re on vacation in Piura, Cajamarca and Las Amazonas until the end of August.

The logistics of raising ducks in Perú could prove to be daunting—finding and maintaining a reliable source for ducklings, for instance (one buys them at 12–21 days and raises them for three months before slaughtering them and selling the meat). Few sources of anything are stable or reliable in Perú and we need ducks very week in order to fulfill orders from the restaurants of Callanca, which feed Arroz con Pato to thousands of tourists from Chiclayo every weekend.

As would be the case in the U.S., regulations could be a problem. The process of turning live ducks into dead ducks will generate impressive quantities of refuse, feathers and duck guts, and we will need to dispose of same in a responsible manner. It’s not clear what kind of conditions we’ll need to maintain in the area where we slaughter the ducks. Refrigeration? This doesn’t seem to be an issue in the public markets here. They sell chickens and turkeys and their carcasses hang in the market stalls from dawn till dusk without a passing glance from their tiny, tightly shut eyes at a refrigerator or a hunk of ice. I suppose there must be some equivalent of what we’d call a visit from the Health Inspector. But how rigorous an inspection this might turn out to be, we can’t yet say. We don’t fear the official regulations as much as we fear the inspector himself. It’s common in these matters for the public official to solicit a little something for his own pocket before your establishment begins to look clean enough to him.

Some in the U.S. will undoubtedly excoriate us for being heartless duck murderers. Vegetarians can condemn us with some justification, or at least they make a consistent and unhypocritical argument since they themselves don’t eat meat. But the rest of us, those who do eat meat, eat the meat of animals raised and slaughtered by someone and our business accepts that someonehood in what we hope will be a reasonably responsible manner. Our aim is to raise our ducks in conditions that Peruvians call “criollo”—what we would call “free-range” in the U.S. So at least our ducks will die happy, having lived a full and fairly rewarding—though brief, 14 or 15 weeks—life and not having suffered under cramped and inhumane conditions such as those we associate with Perdue and KFC in the U.S. We’re more or less a microbrewery and not an Anheiser-Busch in the world of duck production. As such we hope to deliver quality on a large scale and quantity on a lesser scale.

Ninety-nine percent of Peruvians wouldn’t even begin to comprehend such an arcane (some would say “refined”) concept as animal rights. At least here in Lambayeque they happily eat every morsel of protein they can get their hands on. When they finish a chicken leg it looks like the remains of a chicken leg exposed to the desert sun in Arizona for a year.

The guts and gore of this process don’t seem to faze Jesús or Erick in the least. Isabel, the other member of the group forming the business, is a bit more squeamish, as am I, but Isabel will oversee other aspects of the operation—and there will be many such aspects. We buy ducklings in Chiclayo at the public market. We bring them to Callanca aboard public transportation (yes, I’ll be among those Latin Americans infamous among U.S. tourists for carrying their pigs and chickens on the bus). We let loose the ducklings in a large corral made of rustic mateirals like wild cane and carizo, a tall weed with a thick, woody stem. We feed them a mixture of finely chopped vegetables, corn, and other protein-rich grains and meals available at the public market. They grow quickly and after 12 weeks they’re ready to slaughter. We pluck them, eviscerate them and sell the meat for 14 soles a kilo ($2.30 a pound) to the sixteen restaurants of Callanca, which use 800 pounds of duck a week in a dish called Arroz con Pato, Duck with Rice (rice cooked in dark beer with chopped spinach and cilantro). It’s tasty I guarantee you.

The process is a repetitive and cumulative one. We buy a group of ducks every week. We fatten each group for three months. So every week there’s a new group of unlucky ducks ready to slaughter and sell plus eleven groups passing through previous stages in the 12-week process. The businesspeople among you will note that, because we have to raise the ducklings three months before selling them, the first three months of our business are looking mighty bleak in terms of profitability. That’s where the prize money from the competition comes in. Because we won the 5,500 soles we have the funds to weather those three profitless initial months. That’s why we’re able to initiate this potentically very lucrative business while others can’t. “Lucrative” in this case means 800 pounds of duck times $2.30 a pound equals a potential of $2,040 in income per week or $8,160 a month or $97,920 a year. That’s chump change for most American businesses but a fortune in Callanca.

We raised 20 ducklings as an experiment while we studied business principles and wrote our business plan. On my birthday, September 24, we’re conducting our taste test. You’re cordially invited.

Peregrino soy en tierra ajena

If any of you have foreigners living in your midst, I urge you to invite them to dinner, seek them out, make an effort to talk to them, welcome them, and listen to what they have to say to you in their broken dialects. It’s impossible to describe to you how absolutely alone one feels living as a stranger in a strange land.

That’s Exodus 2:22 for those of you with little or no Bible background.

For one thing, Callancanos don’t hang out. That’s to say, they’re often at home, though at unpredictable hours, but there’s little or no hope of actually carrying on a conversation with anyone because of the familial chaos that reigns in the households of Callanca. First, entire families live under one roof, and I mean entire. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, fathers, mothers, children. Or if they don’t live in the same house they live in adjoining houses and come and go as if they lived in the same house. Animals wander in and out—ducks, chickens, pigs, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, what have you. There are always small children around to be cared for and often in significant numbers.

The lack of anything approximating privacy makes one wonder how these children were ever conceived….

If you show up hoping to talk to someone your conversation will be interrupted innumerable times by children falling down and hurting themselves, a relative stopping by to borrow money, another relative appearing in the doorway and communicating some complicit arrangement with a few gestures and numinous phrases unfathomable to a foreigner, the arrival of a large truck delivering propane tanks or beer if the family happens to run a bodega, or sometimes a couple of guys herding cows through the living room to their corral in back of the house.

It’s difficult to maintain the thread of a conversation under these circumstances. Therefore whatever was on your mind stays on your mind, you never really get a chance to express it in any coherent fashion.

This seems to suit Callancanos fine. They seem to get more out of simply being present as a group, together in one place, than I do. They’ve learned to communicate their needs quickly, in those brief gestures and phrases I mentioned, instead of rambling on and on about what they’re thinking or feeling, as Americans tend to do. I think they’re also kind of sick of seeing each other every minute of every day and so don’t need or want to make a big deal out of sharing their thoughts or feelings. On the other hand, they can be physically very affectionate with one another, at least the women can. Mothers and daughters, sisters and female friends walk down the street arm-in-arm and touch and embrace freely and warmly in public.

But that’s not the way we do it and so it makes it difficult for an American to have what an American would call a real friend in Callanca.

Loyalty to the family is of The Godfather proportions in Callanca. The artisans will share work within their own families but sharing work with women outside the family is practically unheard of, which has made it very difficult to form an artisans’ association that truly benefits the members since the members’ primary loyalty is to themselves and their families and not the association. Even at their own birthday parties, the female members of the family work like slaves, cooking for and serving the guests, instead of enjoying a party supposedly in their honor. This is because the quality of service to one’s family—representing the family in a responsible fashion—is so highly valued. In public projects is nepotism rampant? What do you think? And because loyalties within the family are so important, this of course makes it doubly difficult for an outsider to develop any kind of real friendship with a Callancano.

Also, there’s really no public place to get together with a friend. There are no bars in Callanca and because the land is valuable—productive farmland—there’s no public square or market as in most Latin American communities. All the land is either under cultivation or has a house built on it. There are many restaurants but nobody who lives in Callanca goes to them, only visitors from Chiclayo. Callancanos consider it a ridiculous idea to pay 10 or 15 soles for a meal when you can cook it at home for 2 or 3. Plus, if you go to a restaurant, there’s bulla. Noise. In any public place in Perú there’s always lots of bulla, usually cumbia at high decibels. Again, the emphasis seems to be on just being together, not really communicating in any very sophisticated manner.

Language is of course a problem, too. My Spanish is good, but even in English it’s difficult to communicate coherently concepts like “I need to work with you professionally because you are an artisan and I like you personally and you seem to be an intelligent human being so I would like to talk to you; however, this does not mean that I want to be your boyfriend or marry you and take you back to the U.S. with me.” Drawing these lines is difficult enough in English. Imagine attempting to establish and maintain these distinctions in a foreign language and with a person raised in a culture entirely different from your own. What do I maen by cultural differences? Here, for example, is a range of possible ways to address a married woman in Callanca:

“Señora” = always correct and safe

“Señora Felícita” = also acceptable but indicates more familiarity

“Felícita” = getting into dangerous territory

“Fela” = watch out

“Chiscas” = her husband definitely hates you

“Chiscas” combined with the “tú” form of address rather than the “usted” form = you’re dead meat

Because a large part of my job here consists of working with the artisans to improve their prospects of marketing their aresanía, it’s essential that I work with the women of Callanca because all of the artisans are women. But Callanca is a very conservative and traditional place, the older married women will not even shake hands with an open hand, they offer you their fist, fingers down, and you grasp their wrist to greet them. So it’s a tricky situation to dance twice in one night with the same girl at a wedding or walk down the street alone with a woman. The next day everyone in town is saying that you’re novios.

So that pretty much eliminates 50% of the population as potential friends. The men work all day in the fields or at other jobs and when they gather socially they drink themselves into a stupor and fall asleep, so again this situation does not lend itself to deep and meaningful dialog. There are many exceptions to this rule but another stumblingblock to any orderly exchange of ideas is the Peruvian tradition of holding forth eloquently and at great length on the topic at hand, so even on the rare occasions when I find myself talking to a sober Callancano I often find myself listening rather than talking.

My conclusion is that probably we have way too much time on our hands in the U.S. and that communicating with people is a luxury and perhaps is a skill that one develops only after one has achieved a certain level of economic stability and formal education. The rest of the world couldn’t care less what we’re thinking or feeling.

I'm Raising Ducks

It’s true, I and the group of students writing a business plan for raising ducks continue our work on the business plan but now we’ve added actual ducks to the plan. My student Erick Eneque Mendoza bought twenty ducklings from his aunt for a little over 3 soles (a buck a duck) each. They were 18–20 days old when he bought them. Now they’re about a month old and weigh around half a kilo each, the females about 100 grams less than the males.

At a month old, they eat more or less two-and-a-half kilos of duck feed a day. “Duck feed” is a mixture of very coarsely ground corn, wheat, soybeans, vegetable oil, vitamins and minerals. It’s ground to about the coarseness of bird feed. Conveniently, ducks self-regulate their food intake, otherwise you’d have to measure out exactly 135 grams of duck feed and feed each duck individually. Instead you can measure out 135 grams times twenty ducks (two-and-a-half or three kilos) and dump that amount of feed into the feeder. They eat, and, when their body tells them they’ve ingested a day’s worth of protein, they stop eating. I can think of quite a few people who could benefit greatly from a duck-metabolism transplant. Ducks don’t drink beer, either. At least not much.

I’m beginning to believe that my students might continue to raise ducks whether or not they win the business-plan competition. (In August we present our business plan to a panel of judges comprised of Peace Corps and other business experts and the winners of the competition receive start-up funds for their businesses.) This is very satisfying for me. It means that they have not only a lot of faith in but also a lot of enthusiasm for the work we’ve done.

We’re getting into the duck-raising business at a difficult time. As you’ve probably read on the MSNews page while you’re trying to log into your e-mail account, the price of food worldwide is rising at a rather alarming rate. That means duck food as well. Eventually the price of duck meat, the product we’re selling, will rise along with the price of what ducks eat. But there will be resistance to that price hike. So we’re hoping that someone else fights that battle for us before we begin our business in earnest. We’ll be raising and feeding our 20 ducks for eight more weeks before we slaughter them and sell the meat. The price of duck meat as we speak is 14 soles a kilo (about $2.25 a pound) but we’re hoping it will rise to 15 soles or more by the time our ducks are due to meet their maker.

There’s a formidable market for duck in Callanca. Every Sunday the restaurants here feed several thousand tourists from nearby Chiclayo. Arroz con Pato, duck with rice, is the dish of choice. The restaurants need 350 kilos of duck every week. Your average duck yields about 2.5 kilos of meat. That means that to satisfy the restaurants’ weekly demand for duck we’d need to be slaughtering nearly 150 ducks a week. Since it takes three months to raise and fatten up a duck, that means that to have 150 ducks available for slaughter every week, we’d need to be raising 150 ducklings times 4 weeks in a month times 3 months, or 1800 ducks at a time, all the time. That’s some serious duck management, my friend. So we’re planning to start out small, slaughtering and selling maybe 35 ducks a week, raising 420 at any given time.

The particular duck that’s highly sought-after in these parts is pato criollo, which means a duck raised in rustic conditions, in corrals, rather than in a Purina-style factory fashion. A pato criollo is one that eats not only commercial feed but also bugs, table scraps, chopped alfalfa, sweet potatoes and the like. This diet gives the meat a better flavor and it’s that flavor that the restaurants are paying for when they pay 14 or 15 soles a kilo for their duck. The local species of duck is a species we call in the States Muscovy but its genetics are purely Peruvian, it’s not a descendent of the ducks that the Spaniards brought to Perú. It looks nothing like the white Donald Duck ducks we’re used to in the U.S. Instead it looks something like the Peking duck that’s sold in Chinese markets in New York City. In granola-speak we’d call it a “free-range” duck.

A mere 135–200 grams of food a day may not sound like much. But think of it this way, if I ate a comparable amount of food per day as a percentage of my body weight, I’d be eating nine pounds of food a day. I have to admit that I don’t weigh my food but I seriously doubt that I eat nine pounds of it a day. A fully grown duck drinks 600 mililiters of water a day. As a percentage of body weight, for me that would equal 12 liters or over three gallons. It’s no wonder that ducks grow at an impressive rate, maturing in 12 weeks, while a turkey, for example, raised under the same conditions, takes nearly a year to mature. This growth rate, plus its exceptional flavor and high nutritional value, makes duck not only a profitable but also an environmentally friendly food source. It’s been raised in Perú since before the time of the Incas as a staple of the campesino diet.

I’ll post some more pictures of our ducks as they enter adolescence and waddle into adulthood. And of course I’ll let you know how we do in the business-plan competition. Wish us luck, us and our ducks.

Los Ticos

I’ve been kind of busy, thus no word from me for awhile. The Peace Corps sent me to the Middle East to take care of a pesky job that’s been frustrating the government for forever. But that’s taken care of so now I’m back….

What else have I been up to? I’ve been teaching a business course to a group of young entrepreneurs. We’re studying basic business concepts and writing a business plan. In August we and twenty other groups under the tutelage of Peace Corps Small–Business Development volunteers will present our plans to a panel of judges chosen by Peace Corps and the winners of the competition will receive start-up funds for their businesses.

In April I and Fernando, a teacher at the public high school in Callanca, went to Lima to receive training in how to teach this course. Fernando is now teaching the course to 75 of his students at the high school and I’m teaching the course to a small group of older students from outside the high school. My group is deliberately small, four people, since one of the precepts of the course is that all participants should play an active role in operating the business. Fernando is fulfilling this requirement by dividing his classes into groups of five students. In July both Fernando and I will have finished business plans written by our students and we’ll offer the plans to a financial expert—an economist or an accountant—and that person will choose the better plan. That plan will be presented at the competition in August.

My group consists of Erick, a 23-year-old ex-soldier, currently unemployed but trying to keep busy by raising a few head of cattle; Jesús, 19 years old and a law student attending a university in Chiclayo; Gaby, 17 and—like many young women her age in Callanca—without work and with no money to fund a higher education; and Isabel, 18, from a family who runs one the “restaurantes campestres” here in Callanca.

Callanca, in spite of the fact that it’s only 15 minutes from Chiclayo, the capital of the departamento of Lambayeque, remains a very rural, agricultural community and so the kids chose wisely when they selected the theme for their business. They’re going to raise ducks.

This choice may sound odd to you but in Callanca and Lambayeque ducks are a hot commodity. That’s because Arroz con Pato (Duck with Rice) is the most popular dish in the Northern Peruvian cuisine. The country restaurants of Callanca serve up to 500 kilos of duck meat every week. That’s roughly 200 ducks. Someone has to raise all those ducks. We hope that that someone will be us.

Currently the restaurants are buying their ducks either from the Central Market in Chiclayo or from vendors from La Libertad, the departamento to the south of Lambayeque, who load up a Tico (a small Ford Fiesta–looking vehicle often used as a taxi here in Perú) or a combi (microbus) with as many ducks as it will hold and make visits to all the restaurants to sell to the owners. The reason that no one in Callanca is now providing this service seems to have to do with the initial investment involved. One would need at any one time around 600 ducks on hand in order to meet the weekly demand for 200 ducks from all the restaurants in town. Because the prize money for the contest in Lima in August will be 5,000 soles, we will have that initial capital to invest should we be one of the 3 or 4 winning groups in the competition.

As I teach this course I’m becoming a skilled PowerPoint presenter, something I’d have never expected to say of myself. I’m also learning a lot about how I probably should have run my business when I was designing books in the U.S. It turns out that I should have done a market study to find out if there was a demand for my service (there wasn’t). And I should have taken my competition into consideration and done some research in order to find out if there were already too many people providing the service (there were) and I should have carefully positioned my business in accordance with the four Ps of marketing, Product, Plaza, Price and Promotion, in order to assure that I was offering my service to the correct market segment. Instead I chose to offer a product that only a handful of people needed in a market far from New York, the hub of publishing activity, at a price that (though reasonable compared to New York prices) I was surprised that my customers were willing to pay and with no promotion whatsover except for a box of 500 business cards that lasted me for over twenty years. Yet somehow I managed to make a decent living for nearly three decades. At this point I choose to believe that it was in spite of my ignorance and not because of it that Charles Martin Graphics survived.

This time I and my group of students seem to be covering all these bases a lot more effectively than I alone ever did. We have a booming local market that no one else in town is taking advantage of, we can offer our product at the same price as our competitors, and we can promote our product by walking into any restaurant in Callanca and talking directly to the owner. On Mother’s Day over 9,000 people visited Callanca from Chiclayo and surrounding communities to treat their mothers to lunch in the country. That, my friend, is a shitload of ducks.

It’s a long haul from here to August. We’ll be studying business concepts until July and then writing our 35-page business plan until the beginning of August. The kids have chosen the name “Patos Callancanos, Tradición Peruana” for their business. “PCTP” makes a convenient nickname. The name seems like a good enough choice to me. And the important thing is that the students created it and chose it. It’s been difficult for me to let the students run the show. I of course feel like I could do everything better if I did it all myself—at least the marketing and promotion side of the business. I guess I spent too many years running a one-man show. So I’m learning along with the students, they by doing and I by not doing and by keeping my hands off.

Another project that’s keeping me busy is the Banco Comunitario “El Milagro” that my socio Gregoria Mechán and I started in April. This project makes me nervous. In Callanca dealing with money is always a dangerous undertaking. There’s not enough of it to go around and people behave unpredictably and uncharacteristically with sums of money, no matter how small, at stake.

The community bank consists of a group of 13 people, each of whom deposits from 5 soles to 15 soles a week in the bank. From these proceeds the bank offers one-month loans at an interest rate of 10% to participants in the bank. The bank has a fixed period of existence, in our case until December 1 so that the members can withdraw the funds to cover Christmas expenses. When the members liquidate the bank each member, based on the amount of his weekly deposit, will receive a percentage of the profits that have been generated by the repeated lending of the money. The idea is that all the money deposited in the bank should be lent continuously so as to earn as much interest and generate as much profit as possible.

Attendance at the weekly meetings has been a problem. Members would rather send their deposit with a friend or drop it off during the week at their convenience at the house where we’re holding the weekly meetings. But by doing so the members aren’t benefitting from the presntations on saving and borrowing practices that Gregorio and I are offering. Plus they’re not present to approve loans nor to ask for loans. All of which could lead to long-term problems for the bank. Due to attendance problems the offering of the first loans was delayed from week three until week five of the bank and of the 460 soles available to be lent only 300 soles in loans have been requested.

The concept of the community banks is a solid one. The credit available allows, say, an artisan to borrow money to buy materials to create products for an artisans’ fair. Ideally, the artisan then sells the artesanía at the fair and with the profits pays back the loan and interest. All of the funding for the bank comes from the depositors and all of the profits from the bank are shared by the depositors. No outside funding is necessary and the availability of small loans helps out the poorest segment of the population of the community, a group that would otherwise have no access to credit since the amount of money they’re borrowing isn’t large enough to interest an institutional bank. The community-bank idea was initiated and first carried out—with much success—by Peace Corps, Ecuador.

I’ll let you know how it works out in Peace Corps, Callanca.

I also helped stage a free medical campaign in Callanca on May 15. At the April training in Lima for participants in the Business Plan Competition I met a member of a Rotary Club International chapter from Huamachuco, La Libertad. He told me that Rotary Club sponsors campaigns offering free medical attention to deserving communities in Perú. He offered to contact the president of the Rotary Club chapter in Chiclayo and suggest that Rotary bring doctors to Callanca.

In late April I received a call from Esperanza, the president of Rotary Club Chiclayo Primavera. I met with her in Chiclayo and we planned the campaign, which was to feature an opthalmologist, a dentist, a general practitioner, a pediatrician and an obstetrition. Again, my socio Gregorio Mechán offered to help me with the project. Until January 1 Gregorio was Regidor (City Councilman) from Callanca in the Municipalidad de Monsefú. But his party was defeated in the elections in November so now he’s got time on his hands.

Gregorio and I found a location suitable for the doctors, publicized the event with papelotes (Peruvian PowerPoint) and supervised on the day of the event. The doctors brought medications from Chiclayo and an assortment of frames for eyeglasses. They donated the medications and frames. Patients who required glasses paid 20 soles (7 dollars) for the lenses. The campaign was successful but there were the usual number of prolems that one faces anytime one organizes an event in Perú. The general practitioner didn’t show up. Esperanza had told me that the opthalmologist would not offer treatment to patients suffering from cataracts or opaque vision, conditions common in Callanca because the majority of households cook with wood and the resulting smoke can cause vision problems. However, the opthalmologist did in fact offer to see these patients in Chiclayo and provide free care. But we’d already lost the opportunity to publicize this fact and invite individuals suffering from these vision problems to the event. The obstetritian forgot his blood-pressure gauge. We’d offered a free lunch of arroz con pato to the eleven people that Esperanza had said would be coming to Callanca with the medical team but when lunchtime arrived family and friends of the eleven people showed up in droves and we ended up having to pay for lunch for 25 people.

A hundred and fifty people turned out to take advantage of the free medical service. With 11 specialists at their disposition, these residents of Callanca, at least for a day, enjoyed a far more impressive patient-provider ratio than even the wealthiest communites in the U.S. It was fun while it lasted.

The dentist made the most enduring impression upon me. His patients sat in a white plastic chair while the dental assistant held the patient’s head still and the dentist shot the patient full of what must’ve been 100 cc’s of novacaine. The dentist waited a full 45 seconds for the novocaine to take effect and then dove in with a pair of pliers to perform the extraction. Extracion seemed to be the only service he was offering. I didn’t see any tools or materials that led me to believe that fillings were an option. To appreciate the spectacle you really needed to have been there to hear the sounds coming from the patients’ mouths—grunts and groans accompanied by the squeaking of the pliers and the crunching of bone. When it was all over the patients spit blood into a bucket and dentist handed them a prescription for painkillers, which I hope they filled as soon as possible.

At least it was free.

Besides all of the above, I’ve been up to my usual with the artisans, the restaurants, the medical post, the farmers and what (with luck) may one day become the Tourist Information Center of Callanca. I’ve designed an arch for the entrance to Callanca from the Panamericana; I’m helping a volunteer from Germany translate the menus of all the restaurants into English and German; I’m designing a brochure to promote tourism in Callanca; I’m preparing the artisans for a fair in Lima in July; I hawked the cuisine of Callanca at a Food Fair in Chiclayo last weekend and restaurants from Callanca won two third-place prizes and one second-place in their categories. In February, I and three girls from Callanca attended a three-day Peace Corps–sponsored camp for girls, Camp ALMA. A total of 100 girls attended the camp, all accompanied by Peace Corps volunteers from their communities. In March, Peace Corps celebrated its 50^th anniversary and all the volunteers in Lambayeque invited members of our communities to a celbration in Chiclayo. One hundred and fifty people showed up for the ceremony, including the mayor of Chiclayo and the Governor of Lambayeque.

So after 11 months in Perú some of the work is beginning to pay off. And in case you were wondering what a Tico looks like, here’s a picture of one and of some of the 9,000 people who visited Callanca on Mother’s Day.