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.