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.