El Niño

El Niño is a nasty, warm ocean current from the north that every decade or so moves down the Pacific coast of South America and pushes the cold Antarctic Humboldt Current west, out to sea. The western coast of Perú is dry and barren, a desert, because of the cold, dominant Humboldt Current. But during El Niño years the flow of warm water along the coast heats the moisture-laden air above the ocean, the hot air rises, the moisture condenses and for three months the coast of Perú is inundated with torrential rains. The current is called El Niño because it’s typically “born” around Christmastime which means that the heavy rains generally fall in January, February and March.

Fortunately it doesn’t appear that this will be an El Niño year. The locals say that when the winter is cold there’s no El Niño and this year the winter was cold. “Cold” means lows of maybe 40 or 45 degrees. I use the past tense in talking about the winter because we’re in the southern hemisphere here and it’s now summertime for us.

In El Niño years my site, Callanca, is in a world of hurt. Callanca is located on the Río Reque and the river swells and floods a large portion of the town, uproots trees and washes away about 20% of Callanca’s farmland. The river is a blessing for Callanca in that it provides the water that permits the farmers of Callanca to grow carrots, beets, corn, flowers, lettuce, tomatos and cucumbers in the middle of a desert. Think Arizona and the Colorado River. But in El Niño years the river becomes a curse.

That’s because the Río Reque isn’t dammed to within an inch of its life as is the Colorado River in Arizona. So all the water from the El Niño rains rushes straight downriver and nothing in its way stands a chance. And a large portion of Callanca is in its way. The rain causes as much or more damage as the river. Many of Callanca’s houses are made of adobe and the adobe turns back to mud and sags or collapses. Or else roofs get waterlogged and cave in. The river rages in all directions, carving new channels in places it’s never been before and carrying away sections of the one paved road running through the center of town. Nobody can plant or harvest. The dairy cattle can’t find grass to eat. Nobody comes to the restaurants during what would normally be the busiest three months of the year for the popular restaurantes campestres of Callanca. Everybody pretty much just stays in his house and waits for the rain to stop. The town and the economy come to a standstill.

Then when the rains end the farmers wait a few months and again move into the river bed, haul away the debris, begin to plant in the flood zone, and the whole vicious cycle begins again. You can see in the photo below how the river carved away huge chunks of farmland and carried them away, creating this steep bank some 250 meters from the actual river channel. Note how farmers have begun to plant again in the flood plain.

I have a theory about El Niño and Callanca. The people here are difficult to get to know and sometimes difficult to get along with and deeply suspicious of strangers and even of one another. They can be envious, they tend to hold grudges, they’re frequently oversensitive and sometimes viciously spiteful. My friend Gregorio remembers slights that date back twenty years and still mistrusts the people who he feels wronged him. Every artisan that I work with thinks that I favor some other artisan over her and that other artisan thinks the same about everyone else in the artisan’s group. When I talk to an acquaintance in private we exchange pleasantries for half an hour and then this seemingly charming person launches into a vitriolic tale of deceit and betrayal aimed at condemning some other member of the commuity with whom I’m working or attempting to work. I say attempting because probably that colleague has already decided that I’m an untrustworthy person and tomorrow we won’t be working together anymore (though I may not find out that we’re not working together anymore until we haven’t been working together anymore for a month or more).

My theory is that with threats as unpredictable and enormous as El Niño looming over them, the people of Callanca have decided that it’s much easier to fight among themselves and blame each other or to criticize innocent bystanders than it is to confront the very real and sobering challenges that face them. Not just El Niño but also corrupt and inefficient governments at the dictrict, regional and national levels, competition from better organized and more experienced centers of tourism and dwindling market share for their agricultural products, artesanía and other goods and services. It’s an inferiority complex that’s lasted for nearly five hundred years, since the El Niño event of 1578, which historians say drove the founders of Callanca, the Moche, to the higher ground to the west that would later become Monsefú, the municipality to which Callanca has long belonged, first as a caserío and now as a centro poblado.

For both the practical and the psychological or perhaps pathological reasons mentioned above, Callanca really needs a water project, canalization of the Río Reque. I’m not talking about encasing the river in cement but instead about a plan that would involve engineers and lawyers designing an attractive and inviting and viable waterway defined and retained by rocks and boulders and providing a safe venue for the construction of restaurants and other presentable establishments that would help to turn Callanca into a more credible tourist destination. I say lawyers because one of the biggest obstacles facing such a project would be the opposition of the farmers who’ve occupied land in the river bed and who would be claiming property rights to sections of the river channel should such a project be proposed.

This is a project that’s ’way bigger than anything a Peace Corps volunteer could hope to tackle in two years. But it’s probably the most important project that could be promoted for Callanca. El Niños happen once a decade and there hasn’t been an El Niño in Perú since 1998. The second year of my two years in Callanca could be very interesting.