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.