CHARlez

As some of you know I returned to the U.S. on August 28 after serving for three years in Peace Corps Peru. Wish me luck. I’ve arrived with no iPhone or iPad, not even a Facebook page, and with version 10.6 of the operating system running on my Mac. 

I’m arriving in Maine in time to enjoy the last few weeks of summer and leaving behind the very temperate season (the temperature sometimes dips into the 60s) that passes for winter in Peru. That difference pretty much sums up the differences I’ve sensed and experienced between my life in the U.S. and my life as a rent-a-gringo. Summer and winter. Night and day. Here are are a few things about Perú that seem odd to a gringo.

In Perú:

• when you take a photo you have to include everyone from head to foot even if that means that their heads are the size of BBs in the photo

• nobody drinks his own beer; you share a bottle, you share a glass; fortunately the beers are 650 mililiters (22 ounces) so they last awhile

• nobody runs a tab; if you plan on drinking a lot of beer the waitress brings an empty case to your table and you and your friends fill it up with bottles as you drink and pay for the number of empties in the case at the end of the night

• it’s also interesting that you can’t walk into a supermarket and buy a 650-mililiter bottle of beer without bringing in an empty bottle to exhange; makes one wonder how one buys one’s first bottle of beer in Perú….

• people love and I mean love cologne and perfume; if you want to be Dudley Studly in Perú, bathe twice a day in English Leather

• nobody dresses bad; even if you’re down to your last céntimo you spend it to get your shoes shined and your pants pressed

• if you’re wearing a khaki vest with a lot of pockets everyone calls you “ingeniero”—“engineer” (in the U.S. they would think you’re a trout fisherman)

• fat is OK; big butts are OK, too, in fact attractive

• old is also OK; old is good—people listen to you, people ask you for advice, people respect you; even if one is twenty years old, one does not think of a person over sixty as unattractive, addled or useless (and, possibly as a result, they usually aren’t)

• if you’re a gringo you want a taxi; if you’re a gringo you want to change money; if you’re a gringo you don’t like spicy food; if you’re a gringo you grew up eating processed food and canned food and you have no idea what a cucumber is

• when you’re introduced to a woman you give her an air kiss beside the cheek

• you don’t hug; the only time you hug somoeone is on his or her birthday

• if someone offers you food you never turn it down and you eat every morsel on your plate; food is love and who would ever say to someone, “No thanks, I just loved”?

Because of my intense involvement with Perú and Peruvians, I came very close to making some really bad and possibly irreversible mistakes during my three years in Perú. But by the grace of God or of Whomever in fact is in charge of looking out for the foolish and the clueless, I came out of my three-year experience (assuming I make it to August 27) enriched in every way by that experience instead of defeated or diminished or embittered by it, which with a little more bad luck or bad judgment easily could have been the case.

Most of the mistakes I made came about as a result of totally or partially (mostly totally) misunderstanding the culture in which I was living. Confronting people about what I saw as their mistakes was possibly the most consistently stupid thing I did. In Callanca if I were to shoot your dog a really combative way of approaching the situation would be for you to say to me, “At times some people do destructive things as a result of motivations that are not at once clearly discernible but that nonetheless do much damage to those affected by their actions, whether that damage be intentional or unintentional.” Then you would sneak into my yard at night and poison my dog.

As a result of failing to understand this phenomenon my dogs were continually getting poisoned until I finally understood that I needed to stop confronting people and speak to them in “indirectos” like the example offered above.

A close second would be the mistake of pointing out that people were stealing, cheating, taking advantage, being selfish or self-interested. In the U.S. we’ve reached a level of affluence that allows us to be philanthropic and do stuff like volunteer in another country for three years. Here, volunteerism or public service is virtually unknown. If you run for public office it’s so that you can pocket 20% of the budget of every infrastructure or other project that passes through your hands. If you write a project for teaching workshops to women in the community on how to deal with domestic violence you include in the budget a 1,000-sole item for “gestiones” (management) or “elaboración del proyecto” (project development) and guess who gets that money?  I won’t mention who stole what and when and how because as I mention above I’ve learned to speak in “indirectos.”

Another really stupid thing that I kept trying to do, but which ended up working out for me, was attempting to work with women. In Callanca if you talk to a woman everyone just assumes that you’re sleeping with her or that you want to sleep with her. Why else would anyone talk to a woman? So for my first six months in Callanca, because I was working with artisans (all of them women), teachers (most of them women), restaurant workers (everyone who works in the kitchen is a woman), people thought that I had five hundred girlfriends. However, since in Callanca everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing—people live seven or ten or fifteen to a household and there’s no privacy to be had anywhere—it soon became clear that I had no girlfriends. If I’d had a girlfriend everyone would have known about it. So by the end of my service people were saying to me, “Chár-les, you need to find yourself a good Callancana. You need to leave behind some blue-eyed children in Callanca!” Instead of resenting me for supposedly having girlfriends they were now trying to set me up with their sisters and aunts. Neither reaction was really appropriate but at least the latter was more flattering.

In spite of my many blunders they liked me in Callanca. When I left the Teniente Gobernador published this magazine about the work Char-les and his socios had done in Callanca between 2010 and 2013.

No one has called me Charles since the first grade when my teacher, Miss Berry, read off the names on the class roster and I was too shy to tell her that friends and family called me Chuck. For an entire year everyone in first grade called me Charles. In Callanca they also call me Charles, or actually CHARlez, with two syllables, accent on the first. It’s a fact of life in my experience that when you come as a stranger to a new society, be it a new school, a new job, a softball team, whatever, the members of that society frequently give you a new name. It might be a nickname like “Blondie” (the chicanos called me that when I moved from Texas to Arizona in 1968 to go to high school) or “Shuck” (the anglos called me that because that was how some of the chicanos mispronounced my name) or “Smiley” (the waitresses at The Gopher Sports Club in Phoenix called me that when I worked there as a cook in the mid-70s); or instead of a nickname it could be one of your real names but not the one you’re used to. It’s a way of claiming you and putting the stamp of approval of that society on you and accepting you. Or maybe I’m putting too positive a spin on the name-change thing; more likely what I should have understood was that as a gringo in Callanca I was back to being in the first grade.

Highlights of my three years in Callanca:

• Worked with Verónica Eneque to secure a S/.150,000 electric project that provided electricity to 120 families and resulted in the functioning of a well that provided water to 40 families.

• Sold over 1,000 ducks to local restaurants and earned over 40,000 soles working with Erick Eneque and Jesús Gonzales in a youth entrepreneurship project.

• Working with Dr. Jenny and Gisela the obstetrician, arranged the donation of land for the expansion of the local health post; taught diabetes-education classes at the health post and teen-pregnancy prevention workshops at the local high school; arranged the donation of a computer, sterilizing oven and glucometer for the posta.

• Worked with María Custodio to expand the market for her Marinera dresses; Mari was able to build a workshop/studio where she sews the dresses and now employs nine sisters, cousins and nieces whom she’s taught the art of embroidery in her new shop.

• With Gregorio Mechán started four community banks where participants save money and use that money to provide small, short-term loans to one another; the banks operate for eight months to a year and at the end of that time everyone gets their savings back plus their share of the interest earned by the loans. Participants have saved over S/.40,000 and provided over S/.120,000 in loans.

• Leveled and rebuilt a kindergarten with Aldo Rodríguez; previously the school had dirt floors, a roof made out of sticks and mud, no water, no bathroom, no electricity and now has a cement floor, a roof that doesn’t leak, light, running water and a bathroom. The number of children attending the school doubled the year after the renovation.

• Constructed 18 “cocinas mejoradas” (“improved cookstoves”) with Aldo Rodríguez; many women in Callanca still cook with firewood and as a result they and their families suffer from respiratory diseases, cataracts and other vision problems caused by exposure to smoke from open fires. Cocinas mejoradas eliminate these problems since they feature a combustion chamber that encloses the heat source and a chimney that directs smoke away from the house and its inhabitants.

• Formed a Community Leadership Council with representatives of other organizations in Callanca and gained from the Regional and District governments recognition of Callanca as a Municipality, meaning that in 2014 for the first time in its history Callanca will be eligible to elect its own independent mayor and city council and manage its own budget.

• Endured innumerable power outages, water shortages, sewer back-ups, interesting fungi, parasites, intestinal and skin disorders, floods, earthquakes, a house break-in and assault; came to see these as fairly ordinary occurrences and nothing that should prevent one from getting on with one’s work today because something worse was bound to happen tomorrow or the next day.

In Callanca I found that I could work hard 60 hours a week at jobs from which I did not benefit personally in any way, jobs which in fact often were prejudicial to my own interests—financially, healthwise or in any number of other ways—and still be deliriously happy.

Living in Callanca for three years truly changed me as a person. I’ve always been someone whom people respected because I’m responsible, work hard, use my imagination to solve problems in interesting ways and for the most part can be depended upon. However, most of the work I did in the U.S. I did alone. I was the kind of guy who, if you went on a camping trip with him, said, “Give me the tent and leave me alone; I can put it up faster by myself than with you helping me.” In Callanca I learned to work with other people and even developed a reputation for being cheerful, outgoing and “charismatic.” That’s a word in which I do not recognize my former self.

Whether I’ll be able to continue to make use of the elements of my personality that I discovered in Callanca remains to be seen. I like to think that in previously unknown, highly stressful and extremely challenging situations one’s true personality emerges and one finds out who one really is. In the U.S. very rarely did anything happen to me that I hadn’t seen coming. That being the case it was easy to prepare and have several good alternatives at hand at all times. In places like Callanca almost everything that happens to one is something that one hasn’t seen coming and in such moments one has to react as best one can; I believe that those reactions, for being unpremeditated and unrehearsed, inevitably reflect one’s character. If that’s the case then I’m very satisfied—although somewhat surprised—to find out who I really am.

I’m proud of virtually every moment I spent in Callanca. There, I was the person I’d wanted to be all of my life.

After an experience like Peace Corps one is tempted to resort to Kafka’s wry observation that “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” However, I’d turn that observation around and insist that “That which does not make me stronger kills me.” That is to say, if we don’t push ourselves somewhere close to our limits every day and ask of ourselves more than what we believed we could achieve, we die a little bit every day to the extent that we have not done so.

On that note I’ll sign off and go about the business just described in other venues and wish for all of you a taste of the sweetness I’ve known in Callanca as I and my entrañables amigos have been about that same business to the very best of our abilities for the greater part of the past three years.

Actividad

In Perú when you need a relatively large amount of money for a group project or when someone in the family gets sick and there’s no money to pay the medical bills, you schedule an “actividad.” An actividad is like a bake sale of gargantuan proportions—an outdoor activity where you offer food for sale and perhaps supplement the mega-cookout with a dance, beer sales and/or “fulbito” (a soccer tournament). These activities have been known to raise up to 10,000 soles ($4,000). The cookout goes by various names depending upon the meat dish served. “Pollo” means “chicken” therefore your event is called a “pollada.” “Cabrito” means “goat,” therefore “cabritada.” “Causa” is a seafood dish served at a “causada.” So call your next bake sale a Peruvian browniada and see how many takers you get.

Only in Perú where food is king could four or five neighbors with less than 10 years of schooling between them put together a cookout for 600-1,000 people and raise $1,500.

The juntas vecinales (“posees” or “neighborhood watch groups”) of Callanca wanted to buy a motocarguero (a motorcycle-truck hybrid, see above) to use to patrol Callanca in the prevention of robberies and burglaries, which are frequent here since there’s no police presence aside from the juntas. They formed a committee and because they knew I had a bank account, wouldn’t pilfer from or “misplace” the money and wouldn’t be in jail the day of the actividad or otherwise mysteriously absent when money was needed, they elected me treasurer. As the Alcaldesa swore us in that day I knew I was in for a memorable ride long before my rear end ever saw the saddle of a motocarguero.

An activity works like this: you have 1,000 tickets printed. You sell the tickets or “comprometer la gente”—give them a ticket in exchange for a promise to show up the day of the actividad and pay for their chicken dinner. In a well run pollada you collect money on the spot for every ticket you hand out; you then buy just enough chicken to prepare the number of plates you’ve sold. That way you maximize your profit and your profit is guaranteed up front. That’s how things work in a well run actividad. Was our actividad a well run actividad? If you’ve been reading this blog on a regular basis you already know the answer to that question.

Here are a few things people always say in advance of actividades and which in my experience never turn out to be the case:

Top 5 Actividad White Lies

1) “We’ll insist that everybody pay up front!” (Eighty percent take a ticket and say they’ll show up on the day of the actividad to claim their food; of that 80% maybe 40% actually show.)

2) “We’ll get everyone involved and by dividing up the work make it less of a burden on everyone. Everyone will contribute his ‘grano de arena’ (grain of sand).” (Four or five people end up doing everything and for them it’s in fact a significant burden; I know because I was one of the four or five who bore the burden and hauled the ton of sand comprised of the grains that others didn’t contribute.)

3) “Anybody who takes a ticket is “comprometido”—if they don’t show up to claim their food we’ll go to their house after the activity and insist that they pay anyway.” (Actually those people “comprometer” to stick the ticket in their pocket and then you never see them again; nor do you mention it to them afterward because you in fact  will do the same thing when they ask you to contribute to their activity.)

4) “We’ll raise 3,500 soles easily (and in our case have enough money to buy the best motocarguero on the market).” (You end up raising about half of what you estimated and therefore will need to program another activity in order to make up the difference.)

5) “La unión hace la fuerza (In unity, strength).” (In reality it’s every man for himself so good luck.)

Because in our heart of hearts we knew that the few would be doing the work of the many, we decided to hire a “pollero” instead of buying everything and cooking it ourselves. A pollero is a professional caterer who runs a business that caters polladas. On the day of the actividad he shows up with his staff of three, an industrial grill, gas, plates, forks, napkins, take-out containers and 600 chicken dinners including potatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuce, hot sauce, vinegarette and of course chicken. You pay the pollero 3.80 a plate and you charge 7.00. Up front you pay a deposit of 500 soles and tell the pollero how many polladas he’s to bring.

On the morning of the actividad (always a Sunday), people who’ve been selling tickets for the last month show up with wads of bills and loose change in their pockets and dump it in front of the treasurer (in this case, me). With this money and the money you’re about to collect at the pollada itself you’ll pay the pollero at the end of the day and (let’s hope) realize your profits from what’s left over. The night before, somebody buys a sheet of poster board and with a magic marker rules off squares and writes the number of a ticket in each square (the tickets come preprinted with serial numbers). As people arrive with their tickets to claim their dinners you indicate in the appropriate square that the dinner is paid for and delivered. Then you tear the ticket in half, give a half to the guest so that he or she can claim a dinner at the grill and drop the other half in a plastic bag. The pollero keeps a half and you keep a half, that way at the end of the night you can verify the number of polladas paid for and delivered.

This sounds very orderly and efficient but in fact total chaos reigns during this process. People show up and swear that they’ve pre-paid but their square has not been appropriately pre-marked “pagado” on the score sheet. So you have to yell at the person who sold the ticket (remember, a DJ has brought multiple zillion-megawatt speakers that are pumping out cumbia at maximum volume), who verifies from memory whether or not the ticket was in fact paid. Someone shows up with 100 or 200 soles and a list of names and numbers written on his arm and wants to pay multiple tickets. Meanwhile, wild dogs are trying to swipe polladas as they come off the grill and have to be shooed away. The woman taking tickets is trying to breastfeed her baby at the same time. You have all the money in a plastic supermarket bag and have to dig to the bottom for change when someone pays you with a bill. People show up without their tickets and you have to verify that they’ve paid and then prepare an improvised scrap-paper ticket, stamp it with the Juntas Vecinales seal and use it as a substitute ticket. People crowd around wanting to buy tickets and you extract one from the pile of unsold tickets, stamp it, collect their money and make change from the shopping bag. People show up wanting to “fiar” dinners (“For a hamburger today I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday”) and if you trust them you give them a ticket and mark the transaction appropriately in the corresponding square.

This goes on from 12 noon until 7 o’clock at night. At that point people who only want to drink beer and dance have shown up. These are mainly young men from 16-24 years of age who buy a case, encircle it and pass around a bottle and a plastic glass. At about 10 o’clock they all decide it’s time to start a fight. Everybody runs out of money and goes home by midnight.

I had to ask for an armed guard with a private vehicle to escort me back to my house with the money (remember what I said about the juntas vecinales, robberies and burglaries?). The next day someone told me that as we drove away an unidentified suspect cranked up a motorcycle in a nearby alley and took off after us at high speed. If so they never caught us. I arrived safely at home with fifty pounds of loose change in my plastic grocery bag, stowed it under the bed and went to sleep.

So how did we make out in the pollada? As of today (four days later) we have in hand 650 soles profit from the polladas with another 500 or so to be paid “mañana.” We showed 600 soles profit from beer and soft-drink sales. So we’ll clear around S.1,750 ($700) according to the Exel spreadsheet written on my arm.

From beginning to end I was sure that the entire spectacular would collapse under the weight of its own seemingly arbitrary and ill-conceived nature. The pollero wouldn’t show up. It would rain. Everybody would have forgotten to write down the numbers of the tickets they’d sold. The DJ would forget the date or if he didn’t the electricity would go out. Nobody would come. I was sure we wouldn’t make a dime. And if we did some thug would waltz in at 11:00 P.M. with a shotgun and steal it all. Some of it almost did but in the end nothing of the kind happened. It seems that my socios know both the limits of polladas and their potential as well; they know that even if a boat isn’t airtight that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will sink. Given that we’d already received S/.2,200.00 in donations and raised another S/.700.00 on our own prior to the activity, “mañana” we’ll have S/.4,600.00 with which to purchase our motocarguero.

So since “palabra” means word I guess that means that I get to serve myself a “palabrada.”

And next time? Next time we’ll get everyone involved! We’ll make sure everybody pays in advance! Or if not we’ll make them comprometer! That way we’re sure to raise S/.3,500.00 no sweat! Everyone will contribute his grano de arena!

La unión hace la fuerza!

Sustainability

I’ll be finishing my Peace Corps service in August or September. I’m very proud of the work I managed to accomplish in Callanca. It’s a difficult place in which to work but the successes are that much more satisfying for being at times hard to come by. For most of the three years that I’ve worked here I’ve worried that what I was doing here was a waste of time, that none of it would survive past my departure date. But I no longer believe that to be true, I now see that much of what I’ve helped to achieve has a very good chance of surviving in some form. If it does manage to survive it will be the job of the Peruvians with whom I’ve worked to make it survive. In Peace Corps we call these people “socios” or “contrapartes”. The mechanisms that we and our socios build into our projects to make them more likely to survive, Peace Corps calls “sustainability”. Two of the counterparts with whom I worked the most were Verónica Eneque and Aldo Rodríguez. To give you an idea of how Peace Corps operates and why at times the concepts and approaches that Peace Corps has refined over the course of its fifty years of existence do indeed produce lasting results, I’ll offer inspiring and heartwarming (-: profiles of both Aldo and Vero.

Verónica Eneque Mendoza was always a very good socia. She participated in the community bank “El Milagro” and always showed up with her weekly deposits, always paid back her loans and even acted as guarantor for loans for neighbors who weren’t members of the bank but who needed to borrow. She was secretary of the artisan’s association and sold artesanía and homemade desserts on weekends at La Polita (one of the many outdoor restaurants in Callanca) thanks to a convenio that we signed between the artisan’s association and the association of restaurant owners.

Because I’d helped with the community bank and the artisan’s association Verónica came to me one day in August of 2011 to ask for help with a water project that had gone bad in her caserío, Rama Guzmán. This is the nightmare project that I wrote about awhile back in the entry “A Bullet List through the Head”. Because the well for the water project required an electric pump the solution to the problems with the water project turned out to be a S/.150,000 electricity project for all of Rama Guzmán.

As I indicated in that previous entry, the idea of such a project wasn’t easy to sell to Electronorte. However, over the course of an entire year, Vero and I knocked on doors, delivered countless solicitudes and memoriales, undertook innumerable trips to the Municipality to sit for three hours and wait to talk to the Mayor, made many friends and a few enemies at Electronorte and finally, in November of 2012, the phase of the project that connected the well to the grid was completed and in January of this year Rama Guzmán got the water it had been waiting for since the completion of the well in November of 2011.

I would like to say that it was I who inspired Vero to be so persistent and I who helped her to see that she had the makings of a leader. Maybe that was true to a very small extent but if I can take any credit at all for Vero’s transformation from a housewife and mother of 4 to a housewife and mother of 4 and dynamic community leader, the credit I deserve is the credit for recognizing what indeed would inspire Verónica.

In August of 2012 Vero’s uncle, Félix Mendoza died of liver cancer at the age of 56. It was really at that point that Verónica decided to make the betterment of her community a full-time job. Félix had been Teniente Gobernador (a local representative of the Federal Government) of Callanca some years previously and it was Félix who’d first proposed a full-scale electricity project for Rama Guzmán and who’d raised the money to hire an engineer to draw up the plans. When her uncle died Verónica became determined to see to it that the electricity project he’d dreamed of would not die with him. She asked for my advice and for the advice of leaders from other sectors of Callanca. Because we saw that the leadership then in place—the Núcleo of the well project and the newly elected JASS (Junta Administritiva de Servicio de Saneamiento)—did not share Vero’s dedication or zeal, we proposed the formation of a “Pro-Obra” (Public Works Projects) committee for Rama Guzmán, a body to lobby for and oversee infrastructure and service projects of all kinds: water, sewer, electricity, security, etc. In August of 2012 “El Comité de Obras de Rama Guzmán ‘Feliciano Mendoza Campuñay’” was formed and the community elected Verónica presidenta.

Since then Verónica has worked tirelessly to assure the completion of the remaining phases of the electricity project, to implement a comedor popular in Rama Guzmán, to improve the quality of the roads and secure public lighting and to implement a neighborhood watch program to assist the overburdened District Police Department in dealing with theft and other crime in Rama Guzmán. In March of this year the Mayor of Monsefú recognized Verónica’s contributions by hiring her to oversee security issues district-wide for the Municipality. Others in the community have seen what Verónica has accomplished and have stepped forward to provide similar leadership now that Vero is working in Monsefú.

The Municipality has decided to make Rama Guzmán a sort of “model caserío” and will implement more community-development projects there in hopes of convincing more callancanos that working together and working hard can produce benefits for their sectors as well. Whereas the Mayor used to call me when she wanted to know what was going on in Callanca, she now calls Verónica; and whereas the citizens of Rama Guzmán used to come to me when they wanted to promote an initiative or solve a problem, they now come to Vero. Verónica has accomplished what all Peace Corps volunteers hope that their counterparts will accomplish: she’s become a better Peace Corps volunteer than the Peace Corps volunteer with whom she works.

The Peace Corps volunteer with whom she works has also learned a great deal from this partnership. As a Peace Corps volunteer—a foreigner, an outsider—it’s very difficult to inspire or transform members of our communities. They might like us, they might think we’re cute, they might think we’re smart and that we represent a culture that they in some ways admire and wish to emulate. But only motivation that comes from within their own community, their own selves and that’s a constant and integral part of their lives will truly inspire them to work hard enough and long enough to overcome the many and complex problems that their communities face. It’s not our job so much to provide that motivation but to look for that motivation where it already exists, to recognize it when we see it and to use the tools at our disposal to help our counterparts go where that motivation takes them.

Aldo Rodríguez Custodio is both an albañil (bricklayer) and the Teniente Gobernador of Callanca, which makes him a very versatile and effective counterpart. In his capacity as Teniente he promotes a yearly youth soccer tournament and organizes rondas campesinas (neighborhood-watch “possees”) and road-improvement projects. In his capacity as albañil he lays pipe for well projects, fixes the plumbing in the public schools, begs or borrows sheets of tin to fix leaky roofs, and does it all free of charge. He and I rebuilt a kindergarten in Rama Guzmán and had enough funds left over from the budget to construct 12 cocinas mejoradas (energy-saving cookstoves). Aldo accompanied me to a workshop on cocinas mejoradas en Poroto, La Libertad, in June of 2012. The participants built cocinas mejoradas in a nearby caserío and by the end of the 3-day workshop, thanks to Aldo’s facility with adobe, the two engineers in charge were calling Aldo and I “Los Moche” and saying “If they built Chan-Chan (the largest Pre-Columbian city in South America, constructed entirely of adobe), then a cocina mejorada is a piece of cake for them.”

Aldo and I returned to Callanca and finished our 12 stoves by August. The women for whom we built stoves—single mothers and older women suffering from vision problems due to years of cooking over open fires—were uniformly delighted and señoras from all over Callanca began to request stoves. We drew up a project for 50 more stoves and presented it to the Municipality and to several NGOs. No one offered us any money. We drew up a plan that featured an institutional model of the stoves we’d built in Callanca and proposed a project including institutional cocinas mejoradas for the fifteen popular country restaurants of Callanca. Nobody offered us money for that project, either. At that point I thought that the two projects were dead and buried and went back to working full-time on my Community Economic Development initiatives.

One thing that had happened as Aldo and I were building our 12 stoves bothered me a great deal. Whereas 11 of the women for whom we built stoves were women very clearly deserving of inclusion in the project, the twelfth was a woman whose son was a very successful businessman (and a good friend of Aldo’s) and who could’ve easily afforded to purchase a stove. At the time I didn’t really understand Aldo’s insistence on including the family as beneficiaries but Aldo and I compromised—the woman’s son paid for most of the materials and Aldo I provided materials left over from the construction of other stoves and mano de obra. Only later did I understand why Aldo had insisted on including this family.

In March of this year Aldo and I were talking and he mentioned that he’d been asked to build 20 stoves in Olmos and also an institutional model for one of the restaurants in Callanca. Without telling me he’d arranged the two projects with IDESI, an NGO in Chiclayo—one of the NGOs we’d spoken with previously about funding. Both projects would make use of plans we’d brought back with us from the Peace Corps workshop in Poroto. Because Aldo is a Callancano and so is the Director of IDESI and because Aldo understands better than I how to operate in the world the NGOs (the NGO not Peace Corps or Aldo needs to be the entity that gets credit for conceiving the project), Aldo was able to secure the projects whereas I was not. But there was another very important reason why Aldo was successful. The head of the NGO was the son of the not-so-needy woman for whom we’d built the twelfth stove! Aldo and I are now building the 20 stoves in Olmos and the stove for the restaurant in Callanca; and so our cocinas project—though in a form I’d never have expected—continues.

Aldo Rodríguez is just what you hope for in a counterpart: someone who takes full advantage of opportunities that Peace Corps provides to volunteers and socios, opportunities like the cocinas workshop in Poroto; someone who excels when offered such an opportunity; someone who doesn’t give up when prospects look bleak and successes don’t come easily or quickly; and someone who uses what he’s learned from one project to generate further projects that benefit his community and does so without you having to push him and sometimes without even feeling that it’s necessary to mention to you that such projects are forthcoming! It makes a volunteer feel very optimistic about the future of the work he’s begun when counterparts like Aldo take over that work and successfully adapt projects to the changing economic and political conditions in the community. If Peace Corps is asking for sustainability, counterparts like Aldo have the answer.

Small Bubonic Plague Outbreak

There was a rat in the toilet this morning.

It must've swum up through the sewer pipe from the sceptic tank and was doing a breaststroke in the toilet when Nico (my seven-year-old host-family "sister") shrieked and we all came running. Milton (the 15-year-old) poured a few bucketfuls of water into the toilet to flush the critter and chased it with several cupfuls of muriatic acid and we'll see if that does the trick.

There’s a small bubonic plague outbreak in Northern Peru as well. So far it hasn’t made it any closer than 3 hours away from Callanca. They grow a lot of sugar cane in the North and the rats that carry the fleas that carry the plague like living in the sugar cane. So a rat in your toilet is rather worrisome in that sense. But actually the cycle that brings bubonic plague to your doorstep is pretty complex: wild rats, the ones that live in the fields, have to infect domestic rats, the ones that like to live in houses, and the fleas that the wild rats pass to the domestic rats have to attach themselves to you, suck your blood and pass along the infection. So in all likelihood I will not die from the Black Death though it’s possible that I could be burned at the stake or see some other medieval phenomenon get the best of me since conditions here are sometimes uncomfortably close to those of the Dark Ages.

Monsefú

A couple of months ago a television crew came to Callanca to film and interview residents of Monsefú, that’s the District that includes Callanca. The segment they were filming was for a Sunday-morning program called “Domingo al Día” on América TV. It’s sort of a Charles Kuralt type program but more hip and upbeat with fewer long drawnout nature segments with cranes plucking shiny minnows out of silent, pristine marshes. The segment was really a plug for another of América TV’s programs, the famous “Al Fondo Hay Sitio”, a comedy telenovela that’s watched nightly by almost all of Perú.

On “Al Fondo Hay Sitio” one of the characters, Lucho, has been doing a lot of traveling from Lima to Monsefú and there’s some suspicion, especially on the part of his wife, Reina, that he has a girlfriend in Monsefú. The América TV crew came to Monsefú in order to film a segment that showed viewers what Monsefú is really like. There were many questions to interviewees about the romantic lives of Monsefuanos and many remarks from interviewees about how all Monsefuanos have at least two women. This is true, by the way. Many men not only have girlfriends but have families with more than one woman. This practice is common among men 40 years of age and older, much less commom among younger men, though many of them also have girlfriends on the side, but they’ve figured out birth control and are (somewhat) less likely to father children with their illicit girlfriends.

In the video below, Samuel, the interviewer, interviews me, some employees in a restaurant in Callanca and Eusebio, one of the owners of our duck-raising business “Patos Callancanos, Tradición Peruana”. He also interviews the mayor, some artisans and a chichera (brewer of a homemade corn-based alcoholic drink) in the city of Monsefú, the Municipality of the District of Monefú. You likely won’t understand what anyone’s saying but at least you’ll get a glimpse of Callanca and Monsefú, see what our duck farm looks like, etc.

The segment turned out to be terrific free publicity for the duck farm; a week after the interviews aired people were showing up from all over to buy ducks and debate the finer points of marital fidelity.

(By the way, I added two posts today so you may not have seen the previous.)

Here’s the link for the video:

http://youtu.be/UBqoocMoeBs

Feliz Cumpleaños

Here’s my host family singing happy birthday to Judith.

She turned _______ (less than 100 more than 50) on March 9.

Happy birthday, Judith!

In case your Spanish is rusty they’re singing “Happy Birthday”:

Cumpleaños feliz!

te deseamos a ti,

cumpleaños felices

te deseamos a ti!

Muchas felicidades!

Muchas felicidades!

De mi corazón,

de mi corazón!

Feliz cumpleaños, Judita!

A Bullet List Through the Head

A water project sponsored by the NGO FONCODES—a well, tanks and water lines for 47 families—was completed in November of 2011 in Rama Guzmán, a caserío of Callanca. Unfortunately, the engineer in charge of the project did not seem to view as a significant problem the fact that there was no electricity to run the pump, which requires 220 volts while due to the poor quality of the electric service in the area only 140 volts were arriving to the site of the well.

That’s just one of the problems that the water project faced. Here’s a bullet list through the head of some of the irregularities:

• Likely substitution of inferior materials for materials listed in the specifications on the part of the head engineer and the president and treasurer of the citizens’ committee in charge of the project (this is soon to be verified or refuted by an investigation to be carried out by the NGO that funded the project)

• Likely theft of the difference in cost of materials by the head engineer, president and treasurer (ditto as regards the investigation)

• Collection of fraudulent signatures on the part of the engineer’s assistant and use of those signatures to validate documents stating that the engineer had provided training to citizens in how to operate and maintain the well and its electric pump

• Subsequent flight of head engineer to the jungles of the Amazon (after first refusing to answer his phone and finally changing his cell-phone number)

• The aforementioned low voltage at the site of the well (located more than a kilometer from the nearest transformer)

• Subsequent petitions to ElectroNorte (the electric company) to install a new transformer nearer the well and provide new posts and cable for the entire caserío of Rama Guzmán at a cost of 150,000 soles ($55,000)

• Refusal on the part of the president of the citizens’ committee in charge of the project to donate the land on which the well is located after having publicly vowed to do so in public meetings held prior to the inception of the project

• Unexplained disappearance of all the materials left over after the “completion” of the project

• Failure to in fact complete the project; because there was no electricity the well produced no water for over a year after its supposed completion

• Refusal on the part of the president of the citizens’ committee to hand over the key to the well hut so that the electric pump could be tested; refusal of the president to hand over his copy of the specifications so that it could be determined if the specified materials had or had not been purchased and installed

• Refusal of the president and treasurer to attend any public meetings of the committee once word got out about possible irregularities

If you’ve ever had a fishing reel backlash on you then you can appreciate the complex nature of the untangling that each and every one of the elements in this list required.

I won’t attempt to detail how we solved each of these problems; instead let’s take one example, the electricity issue.

The problem was this: not only was the well too far from the transformer but the “grid” in Rama Guzmán was hopelessly outdated and overburdened, implemented twenty years ago for use by fewer than thirty families and now being used by 80-100 families, many of which had simply spliced into a neighbor or relative’s line and were sharing a meter. People had extended the grid by erecting skinny wooden posts or tree trunks and stringing low-tension wire from post to post in order to reach their houses. Where the cable was adequate, trees had grown up and into the wiring, their limbs in contact with the cable, drawing off current. As a result, instead of the required 220 volts, the previously mentioned 110-140 volts were reaching the well site.

ElectroNorte doesn’t hand out projects worth 150,000 soles out of the goodness of its own heart. Many people and a few kindly coincidences contributed to the eventual implementation of the project. Years ago Feliciano Mendoza had rallied the population to petition a plan from ENSA. Each family contributed 15 soles and ElectroNorte technicians came to Callanca, surveyed and measured, determined the number of posts and the amount of cable required, and drew up a plan illustrating the location of each electrical pole, the transformer, etc. The problem was, there was no well project at that point and so the plan didn’t include the well.

 

It would require a novel to recount all that we’ve been through in the pursuit of 80 or so missing volts. First, in November, the JAS (Junta de Agua y Saneamiento or Water and Sewage Committee) in Rama Guzmán solicited a solution to the problem. ElectroNorte proposed a project that would have included posts, cable and a meter so that they could charge Rama Guzmán for the electricity consumed by the use of the pump. ElectroNorte’s solution was that Rama Guzmán should pay the 2,500 soles that the project would’ve cost. This would not have solved the problem, however; without a transformer (15,000 soles) nearer the well to generate the power to deliver 220 volts the pump would not have operated or would have soon burned out due to the low voltage.

I’ll mention only briefly what happened during the following months (bullet list number two):

• First a meeting at ENSA with an enginner named César Manayay about the possibility of implementing Felix Mendoza’s ambitious electrification project for all of Rama Guzmán. He first said the project would be implemented in early 2012; later the date slipped to “sometime in 2012.”

• A trip to Chiclayo with the Alcaldesa of Mosefú, Rita Ayasta, and Victorio, the President of Rama Guzmán’s JAS to speak with the General Manager of ElectroNorte and request implementation of the aforementioned project or an immediate provisional solution to the problem of low voltage at the well site.

• A follow-up meeting with the General Manager in the office of the Alcaldesa in Monsefú. The Gerente suggested a probable solution in “about a month-and-a-half.”

• Following these meetings Engineer Manayay came to Rama Guzmán and made measurements for posts and cable and asked us specific questions about the electric pump and the energy requirements for the well. We asked how long it would take to schedule the installation of the required components; “about a month-and-a-half,” he said.

• A trip to Ocinerg, the oversight agency for public utilities, to discuss the possibility of filing a complaint against ENSA for poor-quality service (insufficeint voltage) in Rama Guzmán. The Ocinerg lawyers encouraged us not to file a complaint immediately but instead to try to work out an amiable solution with ENSA.

• On Ocinerg’s suggestion a trip to the ElectroNorte maintenance facility in Chiclayo. The engineers there have direct control over resources and after consulting Engineer Manayay they promised to look into the matter and give us an answer in a week.

• A week later I called Maintenance. They said that they could not proceed without a formal complaint filed with Ocinerg! If we filed a complaint how long would it take to schedule the installation of the required components? “About a month-and-a-half.”

• Since two weeks of Engineer Manayay’s month-and-a-half had already passed I returned to him for a solution. He said he thought I’d filed a complaint with Ocinerg. When I said I hadn’t, not yet, he promised to coordinate with the General Manager of ENSA and attempt to get the project back on track. I called three more times  during the following weeks. The third time Manayay told me that the problem had now been passed along to another engineer, Enrique Llontop, who was responsible for projects in the Monsefú area.

• I spoke with Llontop; he and Manayay came to Rama Guzmán to investigate the situation. By now I was speaking of the project with such familiarity and confidence that Llontop mistook me for the engineer who had drilled the well and overseen the water project. It turned out that Llontop’s family was from Callanca. Finally, we’d encountered a friendly face at ElectroNorte.

Does this look to you like a setup that would deliver 220 volts?

“About a month and a half” turned into about four months but Llontop came through for us. He secured a transformer worth 15,000 soles from his bosses at ElectroNorte. He put the project up for bids from outside vendors whose work it would be actually to execute the project. That company arrived and began to dig holes for posts and trim trees so that they wouldn’t interfere with the new lines. From that point on only the normal number of screw-ups occurred. For instance a dispute occurred because the road to the well is a private right of way owned by two persons; the property line runs down the middle of the road.  When ElectroNorte installed the posts leading to the well on one side of the road the owner of that half of the road demanded that they be removed and installed in the middle of the road so that they’d prejudice neither party. Everyone managed to shine on in the face of such idiocies and the electric project was finished by November of 2012, exactly one year after it was first proposed.

 

That’s how one and only one problem was resolved. If you multiply the number of bullets in the second bullet list above by the number of bullets in the first bullet list above you get the number of bullets we’ve pumped into our brains over the course of the past year trying to solve all the problems.

But none of that mattered so much on Saturday, January 12, 2013 when Miguel, a handyman from the Municipalidad, arrived at 7:00 o’clock in the morning to drive the golden spike that would connect the two wayward projects; that is, connect the well and its electric pump to the newly completed electrical grid in Rama Guzmán. Was the connection a streamlined, quick, efficient, high-tech procedure?  I’ll let you be the judge:

We’d scavenged about 50 meters of still-usable cable from the 20-year-old cable that comprised the wiring replaced by that of the recently completed electricity project. We carried a roll of this cable, a rickety ladder made out of crooked tree limbs, a length of rope, a wire cutter, a shovel and a machete with us to the well site. We used the ladder to access the electric pole nearest the well. By tying the rope to the end of the heavy electric cable and climbing high enough to attach the cable to the previously erected wooden post and threading the length of rope (followed by the cable) between tree limbs we were able to pass the cable from the first pole to the second, attach the cable, and thread the rope between tree limbs to the next post. In order to accomplish this one person stood on the ladder, another climbed a tree and hauled the cable between mangos and through openings in the foliage. When we got to the final post where the electric company´s cable ended, we pulled the cable taut from below while Miguel affixed it to the post and connected our cable to ENSA’s cable, standing not on the topmost rung of the ladder but in fact on the tops of the two rails of the ladder in order to reach the cable delivering the electric company’s 220 volts.

Digging up one of the electric poles from the obsolete project to use in an expansion of the new project.

At the well site, when we opened the door to inspect the well itself, a few bats flew out of the well hut—a little brick casette housing the well—that hadn’t been opened for a year. Everything seemed still to be in place, nobody had stolen anything nor by the looks of things had there been any serious deterioration of the components. Somebody climbed down into the well on a metal ladder affixed to the concrete casing of the well. He called for us to lower a rope; he tied something onto his end. We hauled up a 1.5 liter plastic bottle half-filled with what had once been Inca Kola and that been floating in the well water for a year.

A few meters from the well hut we dug a “pozo a tierra” about a meter-and-a-half deep, a hole where we could drive a length of rebar into the earth as a ground. We connected a length of copper wire to the rebar and connected the ground to the the wiring that would eventually connect to the control box for the pump. When the hole was dug and the ground installed, we refilled the hole, shoveling in dirt, then pouring in buckets of water mixed with mineral salts, then shoveling in more dirt.

We called Yesenia, a friend who was shopping in Chiclayo, and asked her to buy us a thermo switch to act as a breaker for the system in case of overloads or shorts. Miguel chiseled a few holes in the brick wall of the well hut so that we could insert the ground wire and the wiring that descended from the electrical pole nearest the well. He asked someone to bring him a lightbulb from a house nearby so that he could verify that current was reaching us. The lightbulb lit on the first try! He then chiseled a hole in the concrete apron of the well hut so that we could bring the ground wire up to the height of the switch, tested with the lightbulb again, and connected all the wires to the switch inside the well hut, using a butter knife he’d borrowed from a neighbor as a screwdriver.

We all watched anxiously while he tripped the switch, now connected to the pump. The submersible pump hummed happily twenty feet below us. Next we opened the lever that controlled the flow of water and my friend Victorio climbed a metal ladder on the face of the well tower and looked into one of the tanks. It was beginning to fill with water! It took the 1-horsepower pump about 50 minutes to fill three 2,500-liter tanks.

Finally, we opened the valve that connected the tanks to the community water system. Victorio ran to the nearest house and opened the valve controlling the household’s water and connected a length of hose to the open end of the pipe whose flow was controlled by the valve. I was watching from about 50 meters away. I saw a jet of water shoot out of the end of the hose! Everybody cheered.

I jumped on my bike and pedaled to the houses nearest the well, then to a dirt lane that is the main thoroughfare of Rama Guzmán, shouting, “Hay agua! Hay agua!” (Not “The British are Coming!” but “There’s water!”) I stopped occasionally to watch a family test their connection and confirm the arrival of the water and the force of the water pressure. Later in the day we found and sealed a few leaks in the system but as of Sunday, the following day, every family had its water.

It’s been said many times that water is life; that water is the most basic element that sustains us; but let me say it one more time because on this day it was clear exactly how much truth that statement contains. And the element that sustains life is even sweeter when it’s been a little bit difficult to come by.

One last thought: to the people I’m living with it’s a very, very big deal, it’s a luxury and they’re delighted, when water comes out of a hydrant in their front yard and they no longer have to haul it fifty meters in buckets from the nearest hand-dug well. I don’t know if that thought embarrasses you a little but it definitely does embarrass me. Not that that will keep me from whining about important stuff like too much foam in my latte when I get back to the U.S., but it's worth mentioning.

Yesenia (left) and Victorio (right).