The Duck Business

The duck farm is still functioning. Depending on your point of view it’s either functioning twice as well as before or half as well as before. The two young owners of the business have split it in half and are operating their shares of the business in separate locations.

For those of you who are new to this discussion, this small business, “Patos Callancanos, Tradición Peruana” won a business-plan competition in Lima in August of 2010. The two participants in the competition, Jesús and Erick, received 5,500 soles ($2,000) with which to initiate their business, a duck farm. A duck farm makes a lot more sense here in Callanca than it might in your hometown because there are fifteen restaurants in Callanca and every weekend 2,000 or so visitors from the nearby city of Chiclayo come to eat lunch (and dance and drink a lot of beer) in the rural surroundings of Callanca. The dish they most frequently order is Arroz con Pato, duck with rice.

So why did Jesús and Erick split up the business?

Man, I could write you a novel on that subject. “War and Peace” would make a good title for that novel both as regards its content and its potential page count. But I could easily cut it in half and entitle it simply “War.” That’s because in Callanca people love to fight with each other. I’m not sure why that is, I got here way too late to share in any true understanding of the reasons behind their anger and suspicion the one toward the other. But the fact is that it’s virtually impossible to make any kind of committee, project, business or even meeting function for any length of time without people bickering, accusing, taking sides and eventually standing up and walking out in a self-righteous huff. You’d think you were in a session of the U.S. Congress or something.

This attitude might be a function of the independence of the average Callancano. They’re farmers here (that’s why the people of Chiclayo come here to eat lunch, we’re country folk and we know how to cook well and entertain well) and like farmers in the U.S., they’re very independent. Some people have told me that it could also be a result of many promises offered and many promises broken over the years on the part of various governments—local, state and national. (But if that were the case how cynical would we be in the U.S.?) My personal feeling is that it has to do with a community-wide inferiority complex brought about by the fact that Callanca, in spite of having more than 5,000 residents, is still a part of the Municipality of Monsefú, a nearby town of 30,000. Also the lack of formal education in Callanca gives rise to an inability to appreciate the fundamentals of longterm planning, the wisdom of cooperation, mutual benefit, and the concept of “a rising tides lifts all boats.” Instead of embracing these principles, people get mad at each other and at the first sign of conflict they quit and go home.

So what happened was this. The duck business was functioning well on the property of the Gonzales, the family of Jesús. The business was earning a 20-25% profit after eight months of operation. Jesús and his mother, Iris, each owned a share of the business and Erick owned a third share. The key thing to remember here is that Erick’s surname is Eneque not Gonzales. The fact that there were two Gonzales and one Eneque running the business, coupled with the fact that the business was being operated on the land of the Gonzales, threw the balance of power way out of whack. Whenever there was a difference of opinion the vote went down two for the Gonzales point of view, one for the Eneque point of view. Whenever something went wrong it was always Erick’s fault. Erick wasn’t totally without blame, either. He’s an ex-soldier, very demanding both of himself and others (but mainly of others) and not very easy to get along with in many respects.

The way the breakup went down was something out of a bad “Hogan’s Heroes” episode. The night before they were to divide up the property belonging to the business (200 ducks, corrals, drinking troughs, feeding bins, cash, etc.), Erick was in nearby Lambayeque applying for a university program of study in which he’d been wanting to enroll. As an ex-military man, Erick had taken on the job of security for the business. This job is a serious one in Callanca; because it’s an isolated, rural area, there are many robberies of livestock and other properties. Erick’s job was to stay awake all night guarding the duck farm. He didn’t always do a perfect job of this, many nights the Gonzales had found him sound asleep and snoring, z-ed out on sacks of duck feed. But this night he did a particularly bad job, he didn’t show up at all.

By some incredible coincidence, a robbery occurred that night. Someone stole 33 ducks. Thirty-three just happened to be the number of ducks owed to Erick in the division of the business’s property from one of two flocks of 100 birds.

I can’t really offer any more insight into this strange turn of events than you can. Was it a real robbery and just a fantastic coincidence? Did the Gonzales steal the ducks in order to deprive Erick of his share and show him up as a lousy security specialist? If so why did they steal 33 out of one flock of 100 while leaving the other flock of 100 (older, bigger birds worth more money) intact? When they were going to receive 66 ducks out of that flock, robbery or no robbery, why would they stage a robbery so that they’d end up with the same 66 ducks? True, the ducks that went missing were worth maybe 300 soles ($100) but that’s not much compared to the total worth of the business, some 7,500 soles ($2,750). Certainly not worth the risk of being discovered stealing their own property.

At any rate, now we have two duck farms instead of one. This could mean that there’s twice the chance that the business in some form will survive. Or it could mean that because the business, by dividing intself in two, has essentially doubled its infrastructure costs and cut its inventory in half, it has much less chance of surviving than previously.

Only time will tell. And time isn’t talking, at least not yet….

Cocinas Mejoradas II

We finished our cocinas mejoradas project, twelve cookstoves for twelve families, 61 beneficiaries in all. My community counterpart Aldo Rodríguez and I funded this project with money left over from our renovation of a kindergarten six months ago.

Because our funds were limited ($750.00) we chose low-income families, families headed by single mothers or families that include women or children with respiratory or vision problems exacerbated by cooking over open fires. As you can see from the photos, the cocinas mejoradas contain the heat source and also divert smoke away from the kitchen area and expel that smoke and other contaminants via a metal chimeney similar to that of a woodstove used for home heating in the U.S.

The 12 families have been uniformly grateful for the stoves and satisfied with their operation. We installed the first stoves in July and have returned to visit the families and to monitor the use of the stoves and seek comments from the señoras.

We installed stoves in various sectors of Callanca so that neighbors of the families who benefited from the project would see the stoves in operation; we’ve received many requests for stoves, which could indicate that the families with stoves are very pleased with them or could also mean that pretty much anybody will react with enthusiasm when you’re giving something away. All we asked from the families was a contribution of 60 adobes (at a value of a grand total of 6 soles, two bucks) and some mud from which to make mortar.

We’re calling this a pilot project in hopes that we can use the positive results to generate funding for a more extensive—and expensive—project. We would like to construct 50 more stoves, which would cost some 10,000 soles ($3,700.00) or in other words about one quarter of one second of air time from an Obama or Romney campaign ad.

Cocinas Mejoradas

In June my friend Aldo and I attended a training: how to construct “cocinas mejoradas” (better or imporoved stoves) in La Libertad, the departamento next to Lambayeque, where we live. “Improved stoves” is really a misnomer, what cocinas mejoradas do is replace no stove at all, they’re for people who cook in their houses over open flames from fires fueled by wood. That practice is indeed as bad as it sounds, the walls of their kitchens are black with soot and you can deduce from that what the lungs of the poor women who cook over those fires must look like. They also get cataracts from years and years of exposing their eyes to the heat and smoke.

A cocina mejorada is essentially a very efficient pot-bellied stove. A chimney provides draft, the fire burns hot in a very confined space and uses much less wood than an open fire or “fogón.” The health incentive probably wouldn’t be enough to convince many families to use a cocina mejorada but that, paired with the economic benefit, is often enough to change their minds.

Aldo is an “albañil”—a bricklayer—so he was the right man for the job. We finished our stove in about eight hours spread over two days. Here’s how the work proceeds:

First you pour the “losa,” a slab of concrete that forms the stovetop and burners. It’s made of concrete so as to be resistent to heat. You trowel the concrete over wire mesh and rebar, which provide internal reinforcement. The preparation time is about two hours, more when there’s competition for materials and tools from 15 other Peace Corps volunteers and their community partners.

 

While the losa is drying you construct the base of the stove, made of adobe bricks held together with mud. Because the dimensions of the base and all the parts of the stove are standard and—due to engineering tolernces—unalterable, you have to hack up adobes with a machete to make them fit. Here’s Aldo constructing the base:

 

Next you construct the most important part of the stove, the “cámara” or combustion chamber. It’s made of fabricated clay bricks, seventeen of them, in order to be more resistent to the intense heat generated inside the stove. The interior of the cámara is 14.5 cm square, it’s height is 38 cm. These measurements evidently are ideal for the efficient generation and conduction of heat.

 

After you construct the cámara you basically bury everything in mud. You encase the cámara en adobes, then fill in all the gaps. Next you construct a low rim around the “mesa”—the upper surface of the stove—using chopped-up adobes. Into the exposed part of the mesa you shovel “barro mejorado” (better or improved mud), which is mud mixed with straw, goat shit and ashes to ensure better cohesion and better resistence to heat. You trowel the imporoved goat shit onto the mesa, using the same two pots you used when you poured the losa to define the positions of the two burners. You cut out a bit of extra space to allow heat to flow up and around the pots while food is cooking and a tunnel that allows heat to flow from one burner to the next and finally to the chimney.

Next you construct the chimney, which needs to measure exactly two meters, say the engineers. These two meters can be pure metal (more expensive) or adobe and metal as was the case with our chimney.

Finally, you install the concrete losa, seal it in place with mud, and attempt to light the stove. In order to better accommodate a fire, you need to rub down the still wet interior of the stove with ashes, then you plug one burner, drop a wad of paper and some splinters of wood down the other, then drop a lighted wad of paper into the hole and, if your lucky, the draft created by the combustion chamber sucks a pillar of flame up and out of the burner and you’re in business.

The owner of the new stove is very happy. Ideally, she’ll paint the walls of her kitchen, maybe the stove, too, and neither she nor anyone else in her family will die of or fall ill from a respiratory infection. Since the stove will burn 60% less wood than did her open fire, the stove and stoves like it will help slow global warming and deforestation. Not bad for 150 soles, fifty bucks.

Aldo and I plan to build ten in the next two months in Callanca and, if the owners seem happy with the results, fifty more in the next year. 

Incahuasi

Twice in May I traveled to Incahuasi in the mountains of northeast Lambayeque. Peace Corps is considering sending a volunteer there and asked me to check out the road conditions and the work possibilities for a potential volunteer. I went with a group from CITE Sipán, a governmental organization providing training to the artisans of Incahuasi.

To travel to Incahuasi is, as they say on Discovery Channel, to take a step backward in time, perhaps several steps backward. The women still dress like this:

 

In order to sell a centro de mesa (what we call a table runner) for 80 soles (30 dollars), the artisans:

1) Raise 3 to 6 sheep each.

2) Shear the sheep.

3) Clean and wash the wool.

4) Spin yarn from the wool.

5) Collect plants and bark and prepare dyes.

6) Dye the yarn or wool.

7) Weave the centro de mesa on a strap loom.

I bought this centro de mesa for 60 soles (24 bucks):

 

Incahuasi, at 9,000 feet above sea level, presents some difficult logistical challenges to those who wish to visit. It takes four hours on dirt roads to reach Incahuasi from Chiclayo, the capital of Lambayeque (I live about 15 minutes from Chiclayo, in Callanca). In the rainy season, November to April, the roads are muddy, slippery, rutted, flooded and on a bad day entirely washed away. Still, they used to be much worse. A recent construction project cut two hours off the travel time from Chiclayo.

Incahuasi (House of the Inca) is exactly the kind of place that an American would think of when imagining the life of a Peace Corps volunteer. The residents speak Quechua, a thousand-year-old language derived from the language of the Incas. The majority also speak Spanish but when talking among themselves they invariably speak Quechua. Until recently there was no telephone service. Goods brought in by truck are expensive so people generally grow their own yucca, raise their own chickens, goats, sheep, turkeys and ducks, milk their own livestock, and in general don’t have a lot of use for money.

 

As you can tell by the way the women dress, covered from head to foot in layers of garments like Middle Eastern women in their burkas, Incahuasi is an extremely macho place. The women do the majority of the work, tending the family’s animals, growing the family’s corn and yucca, raising an average of six children per family.

 

When they aren’t doing any of the above, they’re spinning yarn. The women always carry a bundle of wool and a spindle with them wherever they go. While they converse with you, while they walk up and down the street, while they suckle their infants or while they listen to a trainer describe a weaving technique, they’re busy spinning, spinning, spinning the yarn. It’s said quite accurately that the hands of the women of Incahuasi never stop working.

The women maintain haunting and lyrical beliefs concerning their flocks of sheep, the wool derived from the animals, the process of spinning yarn and the weaving of the bags, ponchos, blankets and skirts that they sell or produce for their own families. They believe that the wool grows in conjunction with the cycles of the moon; that is, as the moon changes from a new moon to a quarter-, half- and full moon, the wool, too, increases in volume in harmony with the waxing moon. They liken the spinning of yarn to the growth of a fetus in a mother’s womb since a skein of yarn begins small and thin but gradually enlarges to form a ball that fills the spindle. They compare the preparation of the loom, the placement of the vertical strands of the warp, to the final stages of growth of the fetus and its birth. As they position the strands they tie and cut the strands of the warp as one ties and cuts the umbilical cord. The completed network of vertical strands is like the blanket in which one wraps a newborn child.

The process of weaving is equivalent to the raising of the child—laborious, difficult, time-consuming, back-breaking, requiring much love and great care so that the surface remains smooth and the edges clean and without distortions. When a woven article of clothing or decoration grows old, the women say that it’s a “grandmother.” When it finally reaches a state where it can no longer be used, they dig a hole and bury it as if its remains were human remains.

 

Such analogies suggest why the women of Incahuasi are willing to invest maybe 100 hours in the production of a poncho that they’ll sell for 120 soles. First of all they view their investment as zero and in a way they’re correct. Sheep eat grass, grass costs nothing. Shearing the sheep costs nothing beyond the initial cost of shears (and sometimes they use a piece of broken glass instead). Spinning yarn costs nothing. Dying the yarn costs nothing since plants and bark are free. Weaving costs nothing since the wood for the loom comes from trees that grow on the mountainside. Of the factors we’d consider in determining cost, that leaves only the value of their work. But the women don’t consider their work as having a monetary value any more than a mother would view the work of raising her child as billable time. Work is like breathing to these women. The concept of charging for a breath or a heartbeat seems ridiculous to us, the concept of charging for work—something that’s nearly as automatic to them as breathing is to us—sounds equally ridiculous to a woman from Incahuasi. To an Incahuasina work is the default mode, the natural state of a human being in that human being’s every waking moment. A mother doesn’t say, “I wonder how I could streamline my work flow so as to produce a child of acceptable quality—competitive in the marketplace—with a minimum investment in time and materials?” The women of Incahuasi think of the blanket they’re weaving as a living being; naturally they’re going to go to any length necessary to make that blanket the best blanket possible. A mother does whatever it takes and doesn’t complain about the lousy pay.

There’s an enigmatic Bible verse that beseeches the Christian to do the seemingly impossible, to “never cease to pray.” It’s easier to understand the signficance of that injunction when one watches the hands of a woman of Incahuasi, which never cease to work.

 

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Half-Assed

Because I felt like I should be a part of at least one Peace Corps cliché during my years as a volunteer, I decided to build a school.

That’s a slight exaggeration. First of all, there was already a school there, though not mucho of one. Second, I had a lot of help from a lot of people so it definitely was not “I” who built the school; however, it’s true that thanks to nearly two years of experience as a volunteer I was prepared this time to orchestrate events instead of being dragged along helplessly behind random developments that I never could have imagined much less controlled. Here’s what the kindergarten “Los Girasoles” (Sunflowers) looked like before, during and after:

It started out as a renovation but because of the sorry shape the building was in we completed gutted it and started over. My friend, the Teniente Gobernador, Aldo Rodríguez, happens to be an albañil (bricklayer) so he donated his time to the project and we solicited materials from the Municipalidad, an NGO in Chiclayo, the Ladrillera (brick factory) in Callanca and from James D. Turner, a gringo who founded a school here along with his friend Enrique Pisfil Villalobos, a Callancano now living in the U.S. I managed the budget and purchased materials, Aldo and the crew he normally works with did the real work.

Since this is Callanca, naturally there were people who opposed the project. They could think of bad things to say, even about a project that benefited three-, four- and five-year-olds. The Eneques, the people next door, claimed that one of the walls of the school belonged to them. They waited until we’d plastered the wall and were ready to pour the concrete floor, then showed up to complain bitterly in spite of the fact that we’d filled up all the gaping holes in “their” wall and stabilized the wall so that it wouldn’t collapse on top of them. They demanded that we build another wall abutting the existing wall. Panchita, the owner of the property on which the school is built, came with her brother and uncle to talk with them. The opposing factions yelled at each other for two hours and stalked around the perimeters of the adjoining buildings pointing to imaginary property lines and recounting contradictory versions of how their great-grandfathers had constructed the hundred-year-old adobe wall dividing the two houses. Just when everything looked hopelessly deadlocked they came to an agreement and the work on the school continued.

I learned some very important lessons in helping to carry out this project. One, if you invite the Alcaldesa (the Mayor) to the dedication of the project before you ask her to donate materials she’ll always say yes because Alcaldesas love nothing more than to hand out a few bags of cement, show up at the dedication and take credit for the entire project. On a similar note, I saw reconfirmed a lesson I’d learned previously. Everyone wants his name on the project. So if you generously concede credit for the success of a project to as many other people as possible you’ll get much better cooperation. When the project’s finished you can walk away from it with the personal satisfaction of knowing exactly how much you yourself contributed and how much more difficult the project would have been without your participation and that’s ultimately enough reward for anyone. (Anyone except an Alcaldesa.)

That willingness to share the credit ended up paying off. The Alcaldesa, two Regidores (Counselmen) from the Municipalidad, the Chief of Police and another official from the Muni ended up coming to the inaguaration. Thirty or forty padres de familia (PTA) and neighbors were present as well. As Madrina and Padrinos the Alcaldesa and Regidores donated 170 soles (when they they bless the building they break a bottle of champagne hanging in the doorway and tie money into a ribbon decorating the neck of the champagne bottle).

Another important lesson: when the gringo controls the money the project comes in under budget and there’s even money left over to invest in future projects. Instead of ending up in the pockets of every official, foreman, manager or accountant who comes anywhere near it, the money actually gets spent on the project. What a concept.

Those of you who know us know that I and my brothers have been known to be something of a clique of perfectionists. (To put it mildly.) One very difficult lesson I’ve had to learn in el Perú is that the perfect is not only the enemy of the good but also the enemy of the “half-assed but it’ll do.” This project like all the others in which I’ve been involved in Callanca had its rough edges and its cut corners. Because school vacation was ending and the kids were coming back to school, the crew rushed toward the end and although things got done they didn’t get done with as much care as had been the case earlier on in the renovation. Also, Aldo Rodriguez, my counterpart, who’d promised to everyone who’d listen that he would work for nothing and donate his time, in the end asked to be paid for his work once he saw that there’d be a budget surplus. So it goes. All projects and all people have their defects. I certainly am well acquainted with all the areas of my own character that are held together with black electrician’s tape or painted in two slightly but noticeably different colors of orange. Now that I’m learning to accept those imperfections in my work and in those with whom I work here in Perú, it’s a little easier to consider accepting similar imperfections in myself.

Not much easier but a little.

Hecho en Perú

We finally got the prize money for the duck business on January 8 and at this point we have 120 ducks fattening in our corrals. In case you’re interested in a couple, I happen to know that they travel well. We bought 80 from Patos del Norte, an outfit near Lima, and they shipped the ducklings to us by airplane. The tickets were really expensive, they were heard to say when they arrived, and the seatbelts way too big. Actually, they came in a cardboard carton 80 cm x 40 x 12 with holes punched in the lid and sides. It was small enough that I could carry it with me on the combi. (This is one of the great things about Peace Corps—no longer are you a tourist observing the poor campesino who brings his pig or chicken with him on the bus, you yourself are the campesino with the duck.)

We’d previously bought 40 ducks at a livestock market in Chiclayo but they turned out to be of unidentifiable ages and of dubious genetic purity to say the least. Some of them were sick and infected others in the flock so it cost us time and money to get them all healthy again and growing fat at a steady rate.

Meanwhile we bought these 80 genetically selected critters from Patos del Norte and so far they’re responding in a manner befitting their bloodlines. They were just days old when they arrived and therefore somewhat delicate. They needed to be kept warm at night so we installed lightbulbs for that purpose. The light also keeps them active and eating so that they recover quickly from the trauma of the airplane ride. They’ve doubled in weight since their arrival, which is not saying a whole lot since they only weighed 100 grams, but at least it’s a sign that they’re healthy. Patos del Norte warned us that almost surely some would die but so far they’re all alive except for one—that one the nightwatchman accidentally stepped on.

Which is something of a potent metaphor for this entire business operation: the principals in the enterprise, Erick, Jesús and Jesús’s mother, Iris, cause most of their own problems, undoubtedly with some considerable amount of assistance from their advisor, yours truly. The guys and Iris sometimes forget to give the ducks food or water, separate the sick ducks from the healthy ducks, mix the new ration before the old ration runs out or construct pens large enough to accommodate all the ducks we’ve ordered or plan to order. But now that the new ducks have arrived and are properly housed and reacting well to their surroundings, Jesús, Erick and Iris are beginning to see that good planning and proper attention to the animals’ needs pay off—the first flock of forty may turn out to be “a learning experiece” as we in the U.S. say of utter or near disasters.

The ducklings will need 10 weeks (females) and 12 weeks (males) to reach an optimal weight and at that point we hope to sell them “vivo”—still alive and with all their feathers. Otherwise we’re in for a lot of work slaughtering and plucking 80 ducks. The market for live animals is rumored to be good. A neighbor already offered to buy fifty from us for his niece’s wedding. That might sound like an excessive number of fowl but if you’d ever been to a wedding in Callanca you’d understand. They last three days and 150–500 people show up to eat and drink and dance. They usually slaughter one or two steers, several goats, ten turkeys and around fifty ducks in order to feed all the guests, many of whom don’t even bother to come to the wedding or the reception, they show up in shorts, a T-shirt and thongs and wait to be handed their arroz con pato in a styrofoam take-out container.

If we don’t end up selling them to the father of the bride, pickup trucks from Chiclayo come through Callanca every few weeks as well looking for criollo (free-range) ducks to buy. Callanca is known for breeding tasty specimens of this hardy breed, that can survive and thrive in extremely rustic conditions, fed on just about any form of ration, from grated sweet potatoes, lettuce and alfalfa to scientifically formulated feed like the mixture we’re employing. It’s a combination of coarsely ground corn, wheat and soybeans, soybean oil and powdered vitamins and minerals. We mix the ingredients on a tarp, shovel it into feed sacks, store it and dispense it daily to the animals. In 12 weeks a male duck will eat 13 kg (28 lbs) of feed. That’s 866 kilos of feed (just short of a ton) for a flock of 80 males and females at a cost of around 1,100 soles or $400. The ducklings cost 4 soles apiece ($1.25 or $100 for 80). We can sell the 80 fully grown ducks for an average of 35 soles apiece ($13) or $1000 and change so our profit margin can approach 50% if we manage our other (non-feed) costs well. “Other costs” will or might include: vaccinations, other medicines, transportation of the animals and their feed, electricity for those night lights, etc.

Will we manage those other costs well? Your guess is as good as mine. The prize money we won should cover all of our infrastructure costs—the cost of corrals, a scales, troughs and tubs for food and water, electrical materials, etc.—plus the cost of ducklings and feed for 12 weeks, at which point we will sell our first flock of fully grown ducks and begin to see our first income. Remember I said: “should cover….”

The concept of a rigorous business plan is a very new one in Callanca and for that matter in most rural areas of Perú. For that reason Jesús and Erick and Iris only half believe that good planning will have any effect whatsover on the fate of their enterprise. While that seems outrageous to me it’s not really that outrageous given what they’ve experienced. You buy good seed, you plow deep, you plant straight and rain from the sierra rampages down the river bed and washes it all away. Your family scrimps and saves to send your sister to the best colegio in Chiclayo and she gets pregnant at fifteen. You invest 5,000 soles in raising a flock of turkeys and the week before you plan to sell them somebody steals them all in the middle of the night while you’re at your cousin’s wedding. Planning doesn’t mean to a rural Peruvian what planning means to a college graduate from a middle-class family in the U.S. So I get very frustrated sometimes. I tell the guys over and over that they have to separate the 3-week-old ducks from the 6-week-old ducks because they eat different amounts and because the older ducks will not allow the younger ducks to eat their share, but they don’t listen and it seems like they have no intention of separating the ducks until finally one day I show up and the ducks are in separate pens. They do things according to their own internal clocks and those clocks certainly are by no means Swiss watches but instead are stamped “Hecho en Perú.” Undoubtedly there will be many more learning experiences; realistically I don’t expect Erick and Jesús to change completely nor do I necessarily believe that they should. We’ll no doubt end up with a business that’s something of a hybrid. Something more than a flock of scrawny yardbirds living in a pen of sticks and eating bugs and table scraps; and something less than a criollo Frank Perdue operation for superducks. Since in the end I’m not sure that either of those extremes represents the best outcome one could hope for, I’ll gladly accept something in the middle.

I told you so, Yung Mei

You’ll be pleased or perhaps utterly stunned to find out that I recently received Peace Corps Perú’s Volunteer Excellence Award, an award which recognizes (and I quote) “outstanding volunteers based on five main criteria: primary project success; secondary project success; leadership; collaboration with other Volunteers and with counterparts and host country agencies; and integration in the community.” Because volunteer turnover is frequent given that volunteers serve only two years, Peace Corps Perú doesn’t hand out yearly awards, instead they select two volunteers every trimester to receive Volunteer Excellence Awards. I and a truly deserving volunteer from Arequipa, Rocío Ramírez, received the first two Volunteer Excellence Awards for 2012.

My theory is that they took pity on me for being 59 years old and a diabetic.

Kim Ayers, the volunteer who nominated me, concocted this bit of hyperbole on my behalf: “Charles Martin shows just how much impact a Peace Corps Volunteer can have in a community. While undertaking significant Small Business Development projects, he has done so much additional community development work outside his primary project area that many Callancanos tease that he is the Alcalde Delegado for this distant sector of the Monsefú district. He is a primary trainer for the Artisan Association of Callanca, and with his assistance in networking, the artisans and their products in embroidery and weaving have been featured in the popular restaurants in Callanca, as well as important artisan fairs in Loja, Ecuador and Exhibe Perú in Lima (and as despedida gifts for the Peru 14ers!). Charles also works with Callanca’s restaurant corridor to improve their marketing and promote municipal water & sanitation projects that are so crucial to the success of this fast-growing gastronomía destination. While executing these projects, Charles also managed to find time to set up a community bank with the artisans and to conduct Somos Emprendedores, Somos Perú youth entrepreneurship classes. His group’s plan to raise criollo ducks to sell to the Callanca restaurants won first place in the Somos Emprendedores competition in Lima. Additionally, Charles has assisted local producers of native colored cotton to patent their products. Through all of his work in artesanía, restaurants, water & sanitation, youth entrepreneurship and other small business projects, as well as his patience and cheerfulness, Charles has won the affection, respect, and gratitude of Callanca. Charles is deeply esteemed not only for the projects he has advanced, but the manner in which he advances them, empowering Callancanos of all ages to take control of their lives and improve their living situations. Charles often accompanies Callancanos to the Municipality of Monsefú to show his support for their project requests, and has been very influential in ensuring that all designated funds reach their intended beneficiaries. Volunteers and Callancanos alike wish to publicly express our gratitude for Charles’ support, hard work, and dedication to the Peace Corps mission.”

Please copy to Yung Mei Holaski, the Peace Corps, Washington Placement Officer who told me that she wasn’t convinced that I was applying to Peace Corps for the right reasons and tried to send me to the Ukraine.

How do you say “I told you so” in Ukranian?

October or November?

I’ve been really busy so haven’t had any time to blog, journal, diary, broadside, screed, Post-It or otherwise turn nouns into verbs. It looks like October or November may have been the last time I wrote anything. I’m not sure if I can even remember what all has happened since then.

For Christmas, I visited Tarapoto, which is in the mountains but on the eastern slopes of the Andes, which means it’s technically jungle. Here’s what it looks like in the selva alta:

In Tarapoto everyone owns a motorcycle. I saw a guy riding down the street, his wife behind him on the bike, breast-feeding her baby and talking on her cellphone.

It was a true pleasure seeing a green landscape for a change. Things are very brown here in the desert in Lambayeque.

Before I left for Tarapoto I and my socios from Callanca put together a bunch of “chocolatadas”, six or seven of them, in fact. These are Christmas celebrations at which children are served chocolate, panetón (a light version of fruitcake) and, if the budget allows it, chicken or empanadas. Inexpensive toys are also distributed. If a Peace Corps volunteer did nothing else in his two years of service besides arrange chocolatadas, he’d leave his community a hero. Chocolatadas are the “bread and circus” of el Perú.

By the way, in Perú any celebration or especially fundraising event gets assigned the suffix “ada”. For this reason “chocolatada” (a celebration where chocolate is served), “cabritada” (where they serve goat), “pollada” (chicken).

Other highlights of the last couple of months: we finally got the funds for our duck-raising business. Remember? I taught a business course to a group of young adults and the group wrote a business plan. We presented the plan at a contest in Lima and won first prize. So now it’s time to put up or shut up and last week we bought our first “camada” of ducklings. We will feed them for two to three months, then slaughter them and sell the meat to the many “restaurantes campestres” here in Callanca, which are visited on weekends by hundreds to thousands of city folk from nearby Chiclayo. We buy a new batch of ducklings every week so as to have product ready on a regular basis.

I’ve also invested in a “salchipollo” stand and am working with María and Carla, the two women who own it, to turn it into a functioning small business. At first things did not look promising. They bought the cart and then it turned out that they had no money left to buy chicken or any of the other staples necessary to prepare salchipollo (chicken wings) or hamburguesas. They couldn’t even afford a tank of propane with which to fire up their deep frier. For about a week our efforts amounted to a “nadada”, an event at which nothing, is served.

However, after a few days of selling “raspadillas”—Peruvian snow cones—they put together enough capital to buy some chicken and potatoes and since then they’ve not looked back. After two weeks they were able to pay me 100 soles of the 300 soles I loaned them to start their business. They actually could’ve paid me all of it but I encouraged them to keep some of the money to reinvest. Now they’re also selling cachangas, fried dough with a cheese filling, and champú, a hot beverage made from ground corn. They hope to start serving lunches in the near future.

When I got back from Tarapoto, Callanca was celebrating its día patronal, el Festival de San Benito de Palermo. This is a week-long festival that culminates in the veneration of a small statue of San Benito and a dance featuring a nationally known cumbia band, this year Agua Marina.

The most poplular attraction at the Festival are the “negritos”, cross-dressing masked pranksters who dance to marinera and other regional music and tease onlookers with bawdy insults and insinuating remarks delivered in squeaky falsetto. The negritos are part of a “carnaval”-like tradition, the profane giving way to the sacred (first the negritos, then San Benito), as—in New Orleans, for instance—the debauchery of Fat Tuesday precedes Ash Wednesday. Before plastic or rubber masks were available, callancanos used to dry the skins of the heads of animals, which they wore as masks at the celebration. So there was also an additional element of the savage confronting the human which unfortunately is now missing from the Festival. Nowadays it falls to the dozens of males swilling cases each of Pilsen, Cristal and Cusqueña and starting fistfights in the street to represent the savage.