“Yuck, what’s that on your cockroach, man?”

We’re raising ducks and chickens in a pen upstairs outside my bedroom door. The upstairs is an unfinished area where the family was planning to build an entire second floor. But the money ran out when they’d finished two bedrooms. So the effect is similar to what you see in a partially finished basement in the U.S. In such a basement you find a couple of habitable rooms alongside an area with a concrete floor and a drain, a washer-drier, lawn implements and storm windows, and, for a ceiling, criss-crossing waterpipes. But instead of those basement features here we have an upper storey featuring unfinished brick walls, rice sacks full of plastic bottles for recycling, old broken furniture, piles of sand for mixing concrete, a clothesline and, now, the poultry pen. The ducks and chickens exit the pen, peeping, at dawn and dusk to gobble up insects and then return to the pen where they spend the rest of the day or night roosting or pecking at table scraps. The future of these animals is not a pleasant prospect. They’ll either be slaughtered and eaten at a family birthday dinner or sold to a neighbor in whose home they’ll encounter a similar fate.

The conditions in the rest of the house where I live are not all that much better than upstairs nor do I eat a whole hell of a lot better than the ducks and chickens, pecking at their table scraps and chowing down on crickets and earwigs.

For one thing, there’s the refrigeration problem. Many Peruvians believe that cold foods are not good for you. That’s why, instead of putting the leftovers from lunch in the regrigerator, they leave them in pots on the stove and heat them up again for supper. That’s true no matter whether we’re talking about rice, potatos, chicken, fish, soup or beans.

When my neighbror Rosa gave me a plate of food in exchange for helping her boys with their English homework, I put the food in the refrigerator after returning to our house. My host mother asked me when I was going to eat it. I told her probably tomorrow. She said, “Won’t it go bad in there?”

When I caught a cold, my host mother said, “But you haven’t eaten even one chupete. Have you?” Chupetes are skinny frozen sacks of juice that kids suck on in the summer like popsicles. My host mother believes that eating cold foods makes you catch cold. I guess it’s not all that different from when my mother used to warn me after a bath not to go outdoors with wet hair.

This week my host mother let the bathroom go five days without a cleaning, which wouldn’t’ve been so bad were not six people living in the house, three of them children. After the third day there were clumps of mud, soggy cardboard cylinders from rolls of toilet paper, pools of water, empty shampoo packages and worse on the floor, and in the toilet the diarrhea of one of the children. Not surprisingly the kids get diarrhea frequently due to the sanitary conditions or lack thereof in the house and due to the fact that they continue to eat with their hands in spite of those conditions or I suppose in a weird way because of those conditions. It’s amazing but the gringo has rarely suffered from gastrointestinal difficulties. It’s a tribute to 50 years of having lived as a bachelor, I imagine.

Sometimes I stare longingly at the pen where the chickens and ducks live and envy them their nests of shredded newspaper, orange plastic tub of drinking water and the treats that nature provides them to supplement the heap of banana peels, wilted lettuce and crusty rice on which they nightly dine. But I’ve noticed that sometimes not even they will dare to finish those leftovers from the family table. When one duck snags a morsel of passing vermin exiting a pile of my host mother’s discarded rice, the other duck asks: “Yuck, what’s that on your cockroach, man?”

El Niño

El Niño is a nasty, warm ocean current from the north that every decade or so moves down the Pacific coast of South America and pushes the cold Antarctic Humboldt Current west, out to sea. The western coast of Perú is dry and barren, a desert, because of the cold, dominant Humboldt Current. But during El Niño years the flow of warm water along the coast heats the moisture-laden air above the ocean, the hot air rises, the moisture condenses and for three months the coast of Perú is inundated with torrential rains. The current is called El Niño because it’s typically “born” around Christmastime which means that the heavy rains generally fall in January, February and March.

Fortunately it doesn’t appear that this will be an El Niño year. The locals say that when the winter is cold there’s no El Niño and this year the winter was cold. “Cold” means lows of maybe 40 or 45 degrees. I use the past tense in talking about the winter because we’re in the southern hemisphere here and it’s now summertime for us.

In El Niño years my site, Callanca, is in a world of hurt. Callanca is located on the Río Reque and the river swells and floods a large portion of the town, uproots trees and washes away about 20% of Callanca’s farmland. The river is a blessing for Callanca in that it provides the water that permits the farmers of Callanca to grow carrots, beets, corn, flowers, lettuce, tomatos and cucumbers in the middle of a desert. Think Arizona and the Colorado River. But in El Niño years the river becomes a curse.

That’s because the Río Reque isn’t dammed to within an inch of its life as is the Colorado River in Arizona. So all the water from the El Niño rains rushes straight downriver and nothing in its way stands a chance. And a large portion of Callanca is in its way. The rain causes as much or more damage as the river. Many of Callanca’s houses are made of adobe and the adobe turns back to mud and sags or collapses. Or else roofs get waterlogged and cave in. The river rages in all directions, carving new channels in places it’s never been before and carrying away sections of the one paved road running through the center of town. Nobody can plant or harvest. The dairy cattle can’t find grass to eat. Nobody comes to the restaurants during what would normally be the busiest three months of the year for the popular restaurantes campestres of Callanca. Everybody pretty much just stays in his house and waits for the rain to stop. The town and the economy come to a standstill.

Then when the rains end the farmers wait a few months and again move into the river bed, haul away the debris, begin to plant in the flood zone, and the whole vicious cycle begins again. You can see in the photo below how the river carved away huge chunks of farmland and carried them away, creating this steep bank some 250 meters from the actual river channel. Note how farmers have begun to plant again in the flood plain.

I have a theory about El Niño and Callanca. The people here are difficult to get to know and sometimes difficult to get along with and deeply suspicious of strangers and even of one another. They can be envious, they tend to hold grudges, they’re frequently oversensitive and sometimes viciously spiteful. My friend Gregorio remembers slights that date back twenty years and still mistrusts the people who he feels wronged him. Every artisan that I work with thinks that I favor some other artisan over her and that other artisan thinks the same about everyone else in the artisan’s group. When I talk to an acquaintance in private we exchange pleasantries for half an hour and then this seemingly charming person launches into a vitriolic tale of deceit and betrayal aimed at condemning some other member of the commuity with whom I’m working or attempting to work. I say attempting because probably that colleague has already decided that I’m an untrustworthy person and tomorrow we won’t be working together anymore (though I may not find out that we’re not working together anymore until we haven’t been working together anymore for a month or more).

My theory is that with threats as unpredictable and enormous as El Niño looming over them, the people of Callanca have decided that it’s much easier to fight among themselves and blame each other or to criticize innocent bystanders than it is to confront the very real and sobering challenges that face them. Not just El Niño but also corrupt and inefficient governments at the dictrict, regional and national levels, competition from better organized and more experienced centers of tourism and dwindling market share for their agricultural products, artesanía and other goods and services. It’s an inferiority complex that’s lasted for nearly five hundred years, since the El Niño event of 1578, which historians say drove the founders of Callanca, the Moche, to the higher ground to the west that would later become Monsefú, the municipality to which Callanca has long belonged, first as a caserío and now as a centro poblado.

For both the practical and the psychological or perhaps pathological reasons mentioned above, Callanca really needs a water project, canalization of the Río Reque. I’m not talking about encasing the river in cement but instead about a plan that would involve engineers and lawyers designing an attractive and inviting and viable waterway defined and retained by rocks and boulders and providing a safe venue for the construction of restaurants and other presentable establishments that would help to turn Callanca into a more credible tourist destination. I say lawyers because one of the biggest obstacles facing such a project would be the opposition of the farmers who’ve occupied land in the river bed and who would be claiming property rights to sections of the river channel should such a project be proposed.

This is a project that’s ’way bigger than anything a Peace Corps volunteer could hope to tackle in two years. But it’s probably the most important project that could be promoted for Callanca. El Niños happen once a decade and there hasn’t been an El Niño in Perú since 1998. The second year of my two years in Callanca could be very interesting.

Feliz año

Judith visited for Christmas. We celebrated Noche Buena in Callanca with my host family. Noche Buena typically consists of a huge meal at midnight at which time the family places the baby Jesus in the manger, everyone eats, exchanges gifts, sings carols, plays music and dances. In my house we ate at 10 o’clock, Judith and I handed out our gifts, not really expecting anything in return and receving exactly what we expected, and everyone went to bed.

Just as well because the next morning we left early for Trujillo and Huanchaco, a beach near Trujillo. Trujillo and Huanchaco are located in La Libertad, the department south of Lambayeque (where I live) and about three hours from my site.

I suffered my first robbery in Trujillo. Oddly enough, they chose to swipe my glucometer and insulin. We were celebrating on Christmas night in the city plaza in Trujillo along with a huge crowd of trujillanos. I knew this would be a paradise for pickpockets so I was carefully protecting my wallet and camera. Since I was thinking that a glucometer would be of no value whatsover to any person other than a diabetic I wasn’t as concerned about the glucometer but of course the pickpocket didn’t know it was a glucometer. To him it must’ve looked like a camera or God knows what high-buck gringo gadget.

So we spent Christmas night and all morning the 26th hunting down replacements for the glucometer and insulin. Not easy tasks in Trujillo, Perú. Somewhere in Peru there’s a pickpocket resting easy knowing that he’s maintaining tight control of his glucose levels.

So the vacation didn’t really get started until the afternoon of the 26th. But we made up for lost time. We took a combi to Huanchaco, the beach town, and wandered around until we located our hostal, Naylamp, which is named for a Moche god and turned out to be a beautiful and tranquil spot. Our room was on a hill overlooking the beach and it felt very good to be impersonating a tourist instead of trying to promote international understanding at the retail level.

We visited La Huaca de la Luna y del Sol near Trujillo and also Chan Chan. These are vast adobe ruins left behind by the Moche and Chimú cultures of northern Perú. Their civilizations date back to pre-Incan times, the first thousand years after the birth of Christ.

A “huaca” is a burial site and huacas are scattered throughout northern Perú. There are several in my site, Callanca. But the ones that Judith and I visited are grand and spectacular, the remains of giant pyramids. Since they were built from adobe—mud mixed with seashells—they haven’t survived well the dozens or hundreds of El Niño events that have taken place since the first centuries after Christ. The rains along with accumulations of windblown sand have turned the once impressive structures into nondescript mounds into whose flanks rivulets of rainwater have carved deep fissures. Archeologists are beginning to uncover what’s left of the original structures underneath the debris and what they’re finding is impressive indeed. They’ve discovered murals that still bear the colors with which the Moche painted them and individual rooms with honeycombed walls (designed thusly to provide ventilation) within fortresses that the Chimú built to defend themselves from the invading Incan armies.

We also visited pyramids at Túcume and toured the incredible Museo Tumbas Reales del Señor de Sipan and saw the reconstructed remains of a Moche king and the various gold, silver, copper and turquoise embellishments with which he was buried. The Moche custom was to bury the dead king along with his wives, his priest, his dog and his llama, as well as one or two guardians and hundreds of small handmade vessels bearing corn and chicha and other provisions to sustain him during the trip from this world to the next. One of the most interesting stories we heard was that of one of the guardians. One guardian was buried horizontally next to the king. Before burying him they cut off his feet so that he wouldn’t abandon his post during the afterlife. The other guardian they buried in an upright, crouched position in an alcove above the dead ruler. Like most other ancient tombs the tombs at Sipán had undergone extensive looting until their discovery by archeologists in the 1980s. It’s said that the looters left the Señor de Sipán’s burial site intact because, when they discovered and finally broke into the burial chamber, they encountered the crouched skeleton of the guardian. So the guardian, even though 1000 years had passed, faithfully fulfilled his duty.

Ten Times as Much

I was used to maintaining a very predictable schedule in the U.S. Those of you who know me well know that to be a vast understatement.

5.30 AM Toast, orange juice in my kitchen.

6.30 AM Coffee and paperwork and writing at Northampton Coffee.

9.00 AM My office at Yes Computers to work on book designs.

12.00 MD Home for lunch.

1.30 PM Yes Computers and more design work.

4.00 PM Home, dinner.

6.00 PM A walk, a run or volleyball.

10.00 PM Bedtime.

On the other hand here in Callanca one wakes up in the morning and has absolutely no idea what to expect from the day. Planning is a laughable undertaking. A typical day is a day in which nothing typical happens. A day in Callanca might go like this:

7.00 AM You get up in the morning and go downstairs to eat breakfast. Your host mother has decided to make papitas and tallerines to sell on the street to make some extra money. You eat a potato and noodles for breakfast.

8.00 AM You ride your bike to one of the schools in town to talk to the director and the founder, a Peruvian now living in the States, who’s in town for a visit. The director has assured you that the founder will provide funding for one of your projects, a trip to an art fair in Ecuador for artisans studying at the school.

However, the founder’s mother is with him and doesn’t want him to give you the money. The school is in the middle of a building project—new classrooms—and the project has tapped out the founder. So the mother is doing everything she can to keep you and the founder apart. When you attempt to converse with him she brings over visitors that you simply must meet at that exact moment. When the subject of artisans comes up she tries to divert the conversation to artisans she knows and suggests that you all go to visit one of them. Right now. This minute.

9.30 AM Finally you, the director and the founder lock yourselves in the director’s office and start to talk about the funds. But just as you’re about to close the deal the founder’s mother shows up, banging on the door and shouting that a child has fainted. You aren’t particulary worried since you figure that this is but another ruse perpetrated with the intent to separate you and the founder. However, when everyone rushes to the child’s classroom you find that a child is, in fact, ill—pale and weak and trembling.

Since there are no ambulances in Callanca you carry the child to the founder’s Hyundai van, everyone piles in, and the founder drives the child to the posta de salud—the health post. Someone has called the child’s father and he arrives at the post. The mother had been called to the school previously and had arrived with us in the van.

The health post is 30 years old. Which doesn’t sound all that old but for an adobe building held together with cane that’s ancient. The ceiling of the consultorio where they take us to talk to the doctor is crooked and patched where it caved in last year.

The doctor questions and examines the child and finds nothing obviously wrong. He asks whether the child has eaten, if he’s seemed unusually tired lately, if he’s experienced any mental or emotional stress at home. He borrows your glucose test meter and tests the boy for hypoglycemia. Negative. The doctor writes up some orders for tests and says to take him to the emergency room in Chiclayo, the site of the nearest hospital.

11.00 AM Everyone piles in the van and the founder drives the child to the public hospital in Chiclayo. There are 30 or 40 people lined up at the emergency-room entrance and sitting on benches inside and outside. The founder hands the father 100 soles and the director of the school ushers the parents and child past the line and into the emergency room. She returns and you head back to the school. On the way, you stop at a bank in front of which all the moneychangers in Chiclayo do their trading. You park at the curb, the director rolls down a window, asks for the exchange rate, quibbles for a decimal point, and changes 4000 American dollars into soles for herself and the founder.

On the way back—in English so that the mother won’t interrrupt—you confirm with the founder the funding for the artisans’ trip to Ecuador.

1 PM Back at the school you’re expecting to make arrangements for receiving the money and then go home. Not a chance. Someone has cooked lunch and so you eat soup and ceviche with the director, the founder, his mother and one of the teachers. As you’re finally about to finish lunch, a local woman shows up with some pots, uncovers them, and begins to serve everyone a second lunch. She’s also come to ask a favor of the founder. You suspect that you’ve been kidnapped and parachuted into a scene from The Godfather. What happens next does nothing to quiet those suspicions.

You tell the founder that you absolutely have to go. You ask him to step outside and speak with you for a moment. Outside, near where the workers are constructing the new classrooms, you, the director and founder finally resolve the question of the funding. The founder descends a set of concrete stairs into the basement. The director motions for you to follow. In the basement, the founder pulls out his wallet and counts 1000 soles into your hand in 50s and 100s. You stuff the bills into your pocket. Sargent Shriver turns over in his grave.

And a postscript: They invite me out to dinner the following evening. Since the founder is busy during his brief visits to Callanca, I ask them to give me a call and and confirm that the dinner is still on and let me know what time to expect them. The next night they show up—the founder, his bodyguard, his mother and the school director—at my door unannounced at 8.00 PM, an hour after I’ve eaten. The founder asks if it’s OK if we stop in Chiclayo at a clinic to see his father. He’s brought his father with him from the States for prostate surgery. It’s cheaper here.

We park in front the clinic at 8.30 and the founder and the bodyguard go in. The mother, the director and I stay in the car and talk. For an hour. The founder and his bodyguard finally return, saying that the father is being impossible and that the nurses are at the point of tossing him out the window. As we’re about to leave the clinic and go someplace for dinner the founder’s cellphone rings. It’s the nurses. The father is going berserk, they need help.

The founder and the bodyguard go back upstairs. An hour passes. Two. The founder’s mother and the director go to sleep. I stay awake only because I don’t like the looks of the neighborhood, especially at this hour and with the bodyguard upstairs keepig the founder’s old man pinned to his hospital bed. Just as I’m about to switch on the ignition, close the windows and lock the doors, the founder returns. He’s left his bodyguard upstairs to deal with the old man.

We finally eat dinner at 11.00 PM. I’d eaten before I left Callanca but now I’m hungry again.

Things got a little better after that. The next time I visited the school they handed me a document to sign acknowledging that I’d received funds from the Foundation that runs the school. So Sargent Shriver can rest again in peace. And it turned out that the kid only had the measles. There’d been an outbreak at the school a few weeks earlier. We should’ve known.

After 6 months in the Peace Corps, I have one piece of unsolicited advice for anyone still reading this: you’re capable of doing about ten times as much as you think you can do.

Where It Hurts

Last week we baptized a house. Marlene, the oldest daughter of a neighbor’s family, built a new house a few doors down from her family and is moving her bodega, turkeys and the office of her sister Manuela’s obstetrician’s practice into their new headquarters. Since two businesses will share the house, two different blessing ceremonies took place. I was invited to be the padrino (godfather) for the blessing of the obstetrician’s office.

Not just anyone can baptize a house so they had to bring in a professional, Paola, from Monsefú. They also invited many guests, among them two of the four brothers in the family and their wives and children. One of the brothers has three daughters that everyone calls “the gringas.” I’d previously attempted to elicit explanations. Was their mother a gringa? Had one of their grandparents been a gringo and had they inherited a recessive gene for blue eyes or blond hair? It turned out that the three daughters are albinas.

Marlene and Manuela provide much of the basic medical care for Callanca. Marlene studied pharmacology and sells a variety of medicines in her bodega. In Perú you don’t need a prescription for anything. You can get codeine, antibiotics, syringes, heart and high-blood-pressure medications, viagra—anything—just for the asking. Marlene and Manuela also administer injections, stitch up wounds and offer other essential medical services at a lower cost than the “posta” or medical post, which is often closed when people need it most. Marlene and Manuela are on call twenty-four hours a day. All you have to do is tap on the window of the bodega with a coin as if you wanted an Inca Kola or half a kilo of lard and tell them where it hurts.

Whereas in the U.S. all people do is hang up a framed, cross-stitched “God Bless This Home” fetish and figure that will get the job done, in Perú the process of securing such a blessing is much more formal and interesting. Paola placed a small, clear glass pitcher containing water and cruda, a sweetly fragrant wildflower, on the counter of the apothecary where Marlene would be doing business. She faced the pitcher with her prayer book and we, the visitors, crowded in behind her. She read a formal blessing from the book and paused occasionally for us to repeat pasages. We sang several verses of a psalm dedicated to Santa María Auxiliadora.

The godparents of Marlene’s bodega were asked to take the pitcher of water, turn the cruda plants upside down in liquid, and use the flowers to spinkle holy water along the baseboards and in the corners of the rooms. We repeated this procedure—the blessings, the song and the sprinkling of the holy water—in Manuela’s consultorio. This time I was the godfather so I did the sprinkling of the holy water. It’s easy to see why they chose cruda as the plant with which to perform this blessing or purification. Its smell puts to shame any incense whose powers a priest might’ve brought to bear upon the situation.

Previously I’d noticed a plastic bag containing a small bottle of liquid hanging from the lintel of the entrance to the apothecary. It turned out to be champagne. The three godparents were invited to carry out the last step in the blessing ritual. Marlene handed me a small hammer and asked me to strike the bottle once—but not with enough force to break it. When I did so the bottle rang like a bell. Another of the godparents, Marlene’s sister-in-law, took the hammer, struck the bottle of champagne, and this time it broke. The plastic bag filled with foam. Marlene’s brother, my co-godfather, tore open a corner of the bag and a thin stream of champagne arc-ed out and wet the threshold of the entrance to Marlene’s new home. My guess would be that the hardcore version the ritual calls for the smashing of a bottle of champagne against the door jamb but that the ritual has been modernized a bit to allow for a speedier post-baptism cleanup.

After the blessing Marlene and her sisters served food and plenty of it—spicy garbanzo beans, chunks of pork and beef. Then turkey with a thick yellow sauce made of ground rice. Marlene passed around a decanter of her homemade wine and a two-liter bottle of Pepsi from the bodega. We talked and celebrated and congratulated Marlene. Her house is impressive by Callanca standards—two bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, sitting room and the large room that will house the bodega. It’s made of cement and painted bright pink. Black wrought-iron fences the entrance and protects the windows. The interior walls are painted in pastels—yellow, blue and pink. The floors are tile. For sure it wouldn’t pass code in the U.S. but here it’s a palace.

Maybe it had something to do with having visited Marlene´s apothecary and lay practitioner’s office, but I picked up my first parasite later in the week. It’s called a pique. It’s some form of louse that lives on pigs. But right now it’s embedded in the heel of my left foot. It resembles a callous or corn except with a dark brown spot at the crown which I take to be the pique itself. I’m supposed to visit the posta to have it removed.

A couple of the artesanas and I attended a marinera competition the weekend following the blessing of Marlene’s new house. The artesanas wanted to check out the elaborate dresses of the señoritas and see if they could maybe steal a few designs. The marinera is an intricate courtship dance particular to northern Perú. The couples dress as peasants and flirtatiously pursue and evade one another in circles of ever-diminishing diameter as the marinera progresses, both dances flourishing embroidered handkerchiefs and, in the case of the men, large palm-straw hats. It’s spectacular and the categories include all age groups from 5-year-olds to 75-year-olds. The atmosphere is a lot like a U.S. gymnastics competition. The mothers of the youngest participants are uniformly obnoxious, demanding and fanatical and the judges arbitrary, capricious and sour.

A full military brass band provided the musical acommpaniment and the participants competed in groups of three in front of six judges. The winners of each round advanced to the next. The competitions lasted from mid-afternoon until midnight. We stayed long enough to watch all the categories of contestants complete one round of qualifying. I took a lot of fotos so that the artesanas can copy the designs they liked.

I in fact went to the posta the Monday after the marinera competition and they removed the pique. The nurse asked for the largest needle available in the pharmacy, swabbed my heel with alchohol and began to dig at the hard mound of flesh in which the pique had embedded itself. If you’ve ever dug a splinter out of your finger with a needle then you have a good concept of what the procedure involved. Just imagine a much larger needle and a much livelier splinter. The nurse explained as she picked apart the insect and the bloody meat surrounding it that the piques penetrate your skin and begin to burrow, nourishing themselves with your flesh as they proceed deeper therein. Eventually they lay eggs and, if you do nothing to stop them, the eggs hatch and the next generation of piques starts to chow down. That’s why it’s important to remove not just the pique but all the surrounding tissue. When she’d finished, the nurse showed me the remains of the dismembered pique and the chunks of dead skin she’d removed, washed the wound with three or four kinds of antiseptics, and told me to wear socks and shoes next time.

Mañana

I’m much busier after two months in Callanca than I thought I’d be. Every day I have at least one formal meeting or appointment or other activity that I have to show up for on time and with something intelligent to say. Many days I have two or three or more such commitments and a couple of times I’ve had to decline one inviation because I’d already accepted another invitation for the same day and time. In Northampton, Massachusetts, where I lived before joining the Peace Corps, I used to get irritated that I was obliged to show up at the dentist’s office on an appointed day and at an appointed hour once a year for my checkup.

It’s not that I have more commitments than the average businessperson. In fact I have fewer. It’s that I’m used to having no scheduled activities at all and surprised that I have so many scheduled activities so soon.

Apparently I had to travel to another hemisphere in order to become an average American.

It seems that more and more average Americans like me are joining the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps is growing. Our “class”, Perú 15, consists of 51 volunteers. Perú 16 (there are two classes of trainees a year) consists of 78. Perú 18 will consist of 108 volunteers. The economy must be really bad in the U.S.

Callanca, where I’m working and living, is beginning to show another side to its character. You know how it is when you first arrive in a place—all things are possible and nothing disagreeable has happened to you and you have no enemies and foresee no obstacles that can’t be overcome with determination and a flourish of your Peace Corps business card. Wrong.

The restaurant run by the three sisters that I mentioned in my last entry never materialized. The brother of the three sisters decided to rent the restaurant to the owner of a chain of gas stations from Chiclayo who wants to get out of gas and into gastronomy. The evil brother waited to do this until the other brother in the family, a lawyer who helps protect the rights of the other family members, was out of town. The mother of the three sisters is co-owner of the property but doesn’t have the gumption or business sense to oppose a move like this and besides that she wants to keep peace in the family, of course. So the sisters are fucked and out of luck. This happens a lot in Callanca and in Perú. There aren’t strong laws to protect people from outrageous and unscrupulous business practices and even if there were they wouldn’t protect women because women often aren’t considered people.

I also got a dose of reality in attempting to solicit funds for a trip to an artisan’s fair in Lima. The artisan’s wrote a “solicitud” to the municipalidad requesting money to pay for two bus tickets. I know the alcalde (mayor) so I believed that he would approve the funding or that if he didn’t we’d hear about it promptly and we’d be able to raise the money by other means. But here’s how events unfolded:

Monday. My friend Gregorio in Callanca tells me not to bother going to Monsefú with my petition. The Mayor won’t be there. Gregorio and some other Regidores (City Councilmen) are having lunch with him to talk about Monsefu’s anniversary celebration two weekends from now. I should go to speak with him on Wednesday. On Wednesday I show up at the Municipality. The Mayor is not in. But Belisa, his secretary, accepts the petition and tells me to come back on Friday to talk to the Mayor. I return on Friday at 9.30 AM. Belisa tells me that the Mayor is not in. I should come back in the afternoon. In the afternoon I return and the Mayor is in. But instead of taking me to speak with him Belisa carries the petition to his office and returns two minutes later with the document signed and stamped. That was easy. Although I’m not sure why I had to be present for it to happen. Now for the money. Belisa ushers me upstairs to Administration and hands the petition to Jacki, the Administrator’s secretary. Jacki looks it over and shows it to the Administrator who looks it over and tells me to come back on Tuesday for the money. First the Adminstrator must approve the expenditure. Fine, no problem. I can wait a few days, what’s the hurry as long as I know I’m getting the money? So I return the following Tuesday morning at 9.30 AM. A guard at the door to the Municipality tells me that no one is working today. It’s a “feriado”, a holiday. I should come back tomorrow, Wednesday. On Wednesday I show up at Administration at 9.15 AM. The Administrador is not in. I should come back at noon or anytime before 3.00 PM. They go to lunch at 3.00. At 12.30 PM I return to Administration. Jacki is not in but the Administrator is. He asks me leave the bus tickets on Jacki’s desk and come back on Friday. Then he leaves for a meeting with the Mayor and some other officials to talk about Monsefú’s anniversary celebration on Saturday. This time I’m not so easily put off. I’m not about to leave the bus tickets—which I’ve purchased with my own money, having been assured that the Municipality will reimburse me—laying on somebody’s desk. I’ll never see them again. So I sit down in the Administrator’s office and wait for Jacki to return. When she does I politely ask if there’s a way that we can resolve this matter today, right now. She picks up the bus tickets and examines them. She tells me to have a seat and wait. When the Administrator returns from his meeting with the Mayor they exchange whispers. Jacki returns to her desk and begins painstakingly to type information into her computer. It’s clear from the questions she’s asking me that had I left the bus tickets she’d have had no idea whatsover to whom they belonged, how many people were ticketed to travel to Lima, what their names were or when we were leaving or why. She asks me for a copy of the petition. By now I’m not leaving anything to chance so I’ve brought a copy. I don’t bother to ask what happened to the signed and stamped copy that Belisa and I brought her last week. An hour later Jacki has filled out the paperwork and prints a copy. This is it, I think. Now I get the money. But the Administrator is leaving again. I ask him as he exits if he wouldn’t mind signing the paperwork so that we could conclude this business immediately. “But it’s very late,” he tells me, and leaves for lunch. It’s 2 PM. When I remind Jacki that she’d told me they’d be in the office until 3.00 Jacki shrugs. She says that I should come back tomorrow. Tomorrow comes and this time I don’t waste 4 soles traveling for nothing from Callanca to Monsefú and back. I call Jacki and ask if the Administrator has signed the document. He isn’t in yet. I call again. Not in. And again. This time he was in but has now left. Finally it becomes clear to me that in Perú nothing happens unless you show up personally and wait for it to happen. Then it probably won’t happen anyway but at least there’s a modicum of hope. I try out this concept on Jacki. She eagerly agrees. I should come tomorrow. In person. The next day I arrive at 9.00 AM with my laptop and some Peace Corps forms that have to be filled out for the artisan’s fair, figuring that I’ll be waiting, perhaps for hours, in the Administrator’s office for him to show up. Sure enough the Administrator is not in. I chat for awhile with Jacki and another secretary, Dagra. Dagra tells me that Jacki is a “soltera” and looks slyly at Jacki. Maybe if I marry her I can get the 200 soles for the bus tickets. While I wait five or six other people come in and ask if the Administrator has arrived and wander out when they’re told he hasn’t. Jacki asks me for the bus tickets. Again, although she’s already seen them, I’ve made sure to bring them along. She leaves for awhile to photocopy the tickets. She returns, hands me the photocopy and the document authorizing the payment and tells me to go talk to the Treasurer. The Treasurer will give me the money. I go to the Treasurer’s office. The Administrator is there. As he leaves I shake his hand and thank him for his support of the artisans of Callanca. Several other poor souls are waiting outside the Treasurer’s office and they whisper to him humble solicitations of funds to resolve their own personal or professional hardships, all much more dire than my own or so I gather from what I overhear. The Treasurer invites me in. Her name is Zairita. I hand Zairita the paperwork. Now the money! She discusses the paperwork with a coworker and says that I will have to come back on Tuesday with the President of the artisan’s association. Tuesday not Monday because Monday is a feriado. On Tuesday she will give me a check made out in the name of the President of the association. We leave on Wednesday for the fair.

On Saturday I attend the parade in Monsefú, the festivities celebrating the anniversary of its founding that I’ve heard so much about during this bus-ticket odyssey. It turns out that I’m actually a part of the parade. I march with the delegation from Callanca. Callanca is a part of the district of Monsefú. It is located in the district of Monsefú (which is also the name of a town in the district of Monsefú), in the province of Chiclayo (which is also the name of a city in the province of Chiclayo), in the department of Lambayeque (which is also the name of a city in the department of Lambayeque), and in the the nation of Perú. There are no cities or towns named Perú in the nation of Perú as far as I know. The delegation from Callanca has been assembled by Rita Ayasta, the director of the Fundación Turner-Pisfil, a private school in Callanca. Rita was recently elected mayor of the district of Monsefú and will begin her term in January. Our transportation from Callanca stood us up so we have ridden from Callanca to Monsefú in the back of a cattle truck. During the parade we march behind another truck bearing a stack of four speakers and a gasoline generator that powers a sound system blasting the same marinera tune over and over again for two-and-a-half hours at a volume that will leave me with a measurable amount of permanent hearing loss I’m sure. I can only imagine what it’s doing to the poor guy sitting in the back of the truck running the sound system.

The parade is spectacular. Our delegation includes twenty or thirty tiny children dressed up in marinera (a dramatic Peruvian dance of courtship) outfits, their mothers, half a dozen teachers from the foundation, a truckful of vegetables symbolizing the fruits of the labor of the average callancano, and a donkey and cart loaded with artesanía and ceramic cooking vessels that symbolize Callanca’s traditions and indigenous past. The mayor-elect and I and several mothers including the mother of Enrique Pisfil, one of the founders of the Fundación, carry a school banner and, as we pass, onlookers along the parade route pelt us with rice, sequins and candy. It becomes uncertain as I watch the enthusiasm with which the mayor-elect is greeted whether our participation in this event is motivated by civic pride or whether Rita in fact has organized a political rally at the expense of the Fundación.

The parade ends at 6.30 but I don’t make it back to Callanca until 9.00. First Rita, always the consummate politician, hands out free vegetables from the back of a Mitsubichi pickup that has taken part in the parade. The beets and carrots and tomatoes and lettuce were on display to symbolize Callanca’s agricultural heritage but they’re now serving just as graphically to demonstrate another cultural inheritance—candidates and officials dispensing food or cash in exchange for votes or political loyalty. The One Bag of Free Rice, One Vote mandate as I like to call it. After all the produce has been hauled off we find that the battery of Pedro’s Mitsubishi pickup, the vehicle which is supposed to take us back to Callanca, has died and once we push-start the truck we then have to load the burro into the back. Since the pickup was used in the parade it bears a gigantic billboard fixed to the roof of the cab and so as we exit Monsefú a friend bearing a six-foot-long pole has to precede us and use the pole to lift electrical wires criss-crossing the street to a height that allows the truck and billboard to pass underneath. Then we have to stop on the road out of town at Rita’s house and take apart the billboard and leave it with her. Which leaves me wondering why we didn’t just dismantle it back in Monsefú instead of inching our way out of town while Julio dodged and cursed the cars and mototaxis that were whizzing past the truck and poled us block to block like a Venetian gondoleer suffering from vertigo. Once we’ve stored the billboard and boarded the truck again Pedro’s wife calls to ask where he is and what the hell he has really truly been doing. Pedro tries to hand me the phone so that I can explain to his wife that he isn’t out drinking but she hangs up before I can get a word out of my mouth. All in all it has been a quintessentially Peruvian evening. If it’s supposed to take half an hour it takes two hours and if it’s supposed to take two hours it takes six.

And what happened on Tuesday? you ask. Did I get the money? You bet I did. All of it, even though it’s accepted that, here in Perú, whenever you’re due money from any government official you should expect to receive only half the money as the other half will end up in the official’s pocket. However this time being a pain-in-the-ass gringo seems to have paid off. Really I have no idea whether my perseverence hurt or helped or made no difference at all. Perhaps it would’ve turned out exactly the same had I just sat at home in Callanca and waited. At any rate, Martha, the president of the artisan’s association, and I showed up at the Municipalidad at 1.00 PM, waited about 45 minutes, and the treasurer called us in, asked Martha to sign five or six copies of various forms, presented her with an inkpad and instructed her to affix her fingerprint to one of the forms, and handed her the check. Then we stood in line for another 45 minutes at the bank waiting to cash it.

In the U.S. it’s an insult to make four, five or even two trips to an official’s office to clear up one matter. We consider our time to be valuable and we consider it a sign of respect to take up as little of an official’s time as possible. In the U.S. it’s one visit, get a yes or no answer, and then all the paperwork gets filled out and signed behind the scenes when nothing else is going on. But in Perú it’s the opposite. It’s a sign of respect to keep showing up over and over and over and over and over again at an official’s office and when you’re not present making sure that paperwork gets filled out and that forms get signed then paperwork does not get filled out and forms do not get signed. And by the way, since most of you are Americans, sorry for taking up so much of your time. Just be glad you weren’t reading this in Perú. Instead of half an hour it would have taken you two days.

Rita giving away parade decorations.

Logotipos

You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to design a logo for persons who have never before in their lives seen a logo. Or who think they haven’t. Of course they’ve seen hundreds, thousands, but they’ve never given any thought to what a logo is for or what value it might have.

Come to think of it, how much value, in fact, does a logo have?

At any rate, as part of my work as a Peace Corps small–business development volunteer, I’m now in the business of designing logos for small businesses here in Callanca, Perú. I’ve designed three very attractive logos but I’ve yet to get any response in return beyond inquisitive stares. Until my arrival, the concept of publicity in Callanca has been to cram as much information and as many images on a business card as will possibly fit and then to add 5 more images and 30 more bulleted items to that count.

I’ve designed logos for two artisans’ associations and for one restaurant. The restaurant really interests me due to the fascinating and soap opera–like elements to the story behind its existence. The restaurant is operated by three sisters, Juana, Marlene and Manuela. Their father and brother still own and previously operated the restaurant. However, two years ago they joined an evangelical church here in Callanca and, due to the zeal with which they approached their new-found faith, began to neglect the restaurant. Even worse, they refused to serve beer or chicha. In Callanca, this is roughly equivalent to refusing to offer tartar sauce in a seafood restaurant. Fortunately, the three sisters remain staunchly catholic and serving liquor doesn’t seem to violate any of the precepts of their religious faith.

So the three sisters are taking over the restaurant and changing the name from El Buen Samaritano: el Primer Restaurante Campestre Cristiano de Callanca (The Good Samaritan: the First Christian Country Restaurant in Callanca) to Las Tres Hermanas (The Three Sisters). Good move, girls.

Perú’s is still a decidedly macho society and the thought of three women running a restaurant in Callanca is mildly revolutionary. In Callanca the men love nothing better than to get shit-faced on Brahma beer and chicha and go looking for a woman to beat up. So I’m feeling good about supporting Juana, Marlene and Manuela. In addition to designing their logo I helped them come up with a list of possible names for the restaurant and suggested that they let their customers help select the name via a popular vote.

In Callanca working in small-business development generally requires this type of personal approach. I’ve tried organizing meetings of interested businessmen for the purpose of presenting workshops on basic business principles. Generally three people show up and those three show up an hour late, accompanied by scrawny dogs and a daughter or niece who opens her blouse in the middle of my presentation and begins to suckle her infant. But I’ve had very good success going to the homes or businessplaces of people who’ve expressed an interest in improving the prospects of their businesses. I’ve helped artisans determine a fair price for their artesanía by means of startlingly innovative approaches like adding together the cost of materials and the value of wages earned during the time devoted to producing an object of art, tacking on a 20% profit, and fixing a price based on these calculations. I’ve visited the workshop of a mechanic who fixes motorcylcles and mototaxis and helped him come up with a business plan that takes into account the future changes in transportation norms likely to occur in Callanca due to population increases, the lengthening of the paved section of road that traverses Callanca, and the influx of automobiles and public transportation accompanying the changes mentioned and the resulting transformation of Callanca from a comminity dependent upon one form of transportation—motos—to a community utilizing many forms of transportation—cars and microbuses and trucks and taxis in addition to motorcyles and mototaxis.

All this has been great fun since, instead of standing in front of a white board with a dry marker in my hand, I’ve been able to visit people in their homes and businesses and see how they live, share whatever they’re having for lunch, and better understand the exact circumstances under which their businesses operate. I’ve never been much of a professor type and I have a lot more success dealing with people as individuals rather than trying to motivate people en masse. Were I the epitomy of evil I’d be Charlie Manson not Adolf Hitler.

However, sometimes I wish I were an Environment or Water and Sanitation volunteer rather than a Small-business Development volunteer. There are a great number of very basic needs and there is a great deal of poverty in Callanca. People living in mud houses with dirt floors and roofs made out of sticks and straw. People drinking water they haul from ditches in buckets. People who eat rice and potatoes with boiled chicken feet three times a day. There’s no sense in Callanca or in Perú that one can start with nothing and through hard work and resolute determination rise from a less prosperous to a more prosperous economic class. Instead there’s a sense that one sure as shit better work hard and better work with grim determination or one will starve to death or die of dyssentery or cholera. Although they don’t appear much like philosophers callancanos could teach Immanuel Kant himself a thing or two about the philosophy of determinism. There’s a nearly universal belief here that nobody in power will help you, that no amount of effort will make anything better, that nothing you could ever possibly do would ever change your fate one whit. So you find very few people willing to try out new ideas or take risks or get very excited about anything at all. That’s what makes people like Barco, the mototaxi mechanic, and Juana, Marlene and Manuela, the restarateurs, so inspiring.

Complacent, resigned, beaten down, beaten up, cynical, skeptical, apathetic, inert, hurt, betrayed, cheated, swindled, bewildered, lied to, shit on, misled, mistreated, aggravated and exhausted. That’s your average callancano. And in general they feel that way for good reason. Nevertheless, they’re still able and willing for the most part to greet a newly arrived gringo—even a gringo wearing 80-dollar tennis shoes and carrying a laptop—with curiosity, respect and occasionally even a hint of optimism. Many believe that all gringos arrive with scads of money. So as a gringo it’s not unusual to find yourself in the middle of a discussion that you believed was about the weather or the relationship of your partner in conversation to other callancanos with the same last name and suddenly be asked about your “mensualidad”—how much money the Peace Corps pays you—or about how much you’re paying your host family to live with them or if the Peace Corps could provide a sum of money so that the questioner’s wife could plant and raise produce in his front yard. Not infrequently someone will just flat out ask you for cash. Fortunately, once the community recognizes that you’re not a tourist and that you’ll be living there for an extended period of time and once they see that you’re actually doing work every day, this line of questioning becomes less frequent. But it never really goes away. Peruvians think all gringos are rich. And compared to Peruvians we all are rich. For instance as Peace Corps volunteers living “under conditions of hardship, if necessary” and at an economic level “that enables them to maintain a modest but safe, healthy, and adequate lifestyle” we receive 1000 soles a month (about $300) from Peace Corps for food, housing and daily expenditures, while the monthly wage of the average Peruvian is about 550 soles a month. So as “volunteers” we’re making more than a Peruvian with a full-time job.

I’m “integrating” as Peace Corps likes to put it. That means that I’m now used to and not distracted by very natural, commonplace and necessary acts like breastfeeding during a PowerPoint demonstration or peeing in public against the side of a building. Every day I see at least one thing that shocks and disquiets me but most days I also see something that surprises and delights me. Sometimes the two things are the same thing. The two phenomena no longer seem to me to be mutually exclusive.