Peregrino soy en tierra ajena

If any of you have foreigners living in your midst, I urge you to invite them to dinner, seek them out, make an effort to talk to them, welcome them, and listen to what they have to say to you in their broken dialects. It’s impossible to describe to you how absolutely alone one feels living as a stranger in a strange land.

That’s Exodus 2:22 for those of you with little or no Bible background.

For one thing, Callancanos don’t hang out. That’s to say, they’re often at home, though at unpredictable hours, but there’s little or no hope of actually carrying on a conversation with anyone because of the familial chaos that reigns in the households of Callanca. First, entire families live under one roof, and I mean entire. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, fathers, mothers, children. Or if they don’t live in the same house they live in adjoining houses and come and go as if they lived in the same house. Animals wander in and out—ducks, chickens, pigs, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, what have you. There are always small children around to be cared for and often in significant numbers.

The lack of anything approximating privacy makes one wonder how these children were ever conceived….

If you show up hoping to talk to someone your conversation will be interrupted innumerable times by children falling down and hurting themselves, a relative stopping by to borrow money, another relative appearing in the doorway and communicating some complicit arrangement with a few gestures and numinous phrases unfathomable to a foreigner, the arrival of a large truck delivering propane tanks or beer if the family happens to run a bodega, or sometimes a couple of guys herding cows through the living room to their corral in back of the house.

It’s difficult to maintain the thread of a conversation under these circumstances. Therefore whatever was on your mind stays on your mind, you never really get a chance to express it in any coherent fashion.

This seems to suit Callancanos fine. They seem to get more out of simply being present as a group, together in one place, than I do. They’ve learned to communicate their needs quickly, in those brief gestures and phrases I mentioned, instead of rambling on and on about what they’re thinking or feeling, as Americans tend to do. I think they’re also kind of sick of seeing each other every minute of every day and so don’t need or want to make a big deal out of sharing their thoughts or feelings. On the other hand, they can be physically very affectionate with one another, at least the women can. Mothers and daughters, sisters and female friends walk down the street arm-in-arm and touch and embrace freely and warmly in public.

But that’s not the way we do it and so it makes it difficult for an American to have what an American would call a real friend in Callanca.

Loyalty to the family is of The Godfather proportions in Callanca. The artisans will share work within their own families but sharing work with women outside the family is practically unheard of, which has made it very difficult to form an artisans’ association that truly benefits the members since the members’ primary loyalty is to themselves and their families and not the association. Even at their own birthday parties, the female members of the family work like slaves, cooking for and serving the guests, instead of enjoying a party supposedly in their honor. This is because the quality of service to one’s family—representing the family in a responsible fashion—is so highly valued. In public projects is nepotism rampant? What do you think? And because loyalties within the family are so important, this of course makes it doubly difficult for an outsider to develop any kind of real friendship with a Callancano.

Also, there’s really no public place to get together with a friend. There are no bars in Callanca and because the land is valuable—productive farmland—there’s no public square or market as in most Latin American communities. All the land is either under cultivation or has a house built on it. There are many restaurants but nobody who lives in Callanca goes to them, only visitors from Chiclayo. Callancanos consider it a ridiculous idea to pay 10 or 15 soles for a meal when you can cook it at home for 2 or 3. Plus, if you go to a restaurant, there’s bulla. Noise. In any public place in Perú there’s always lots of bulla, usually cumbia at high decibels. Again, the emphasis seems to be on just being together, not really communicating in any very sophisticated manner.

Language is of course a problem, too. My Spanish is good, but even in English it’s difficult to communicate coherently concepts like “I need to work with you professionally because you are an artisan and I like you personally and you seem to be an intelligent human being so I would like to talk to you; however, this does not mean that I want to be your boyfriend or marry you and take you back to the U.S. with me.” Drawing these lines is difficult enough in English. Imagine attempting to establish and maintain these distinctions in a foreign language and with a person raised in a culture entirely different from your own. What do I maen by cultural differences? Here, for example, is a range of possible ways to address a married woman in Callanca:

“Señora” = always correct and safe

“Señora Felícita” = also acceptable but indicates more familiarity

“Felícita” = getting into dangerous territory

“Fela” = watch out

“Chiscas” = her husband definitely hates you

“Chiscas” combined with the “tú” form of address rather than the “usted” form = you’re dead meat

Because a large part of my job here consists of working with the artisans to improve their prospects of marketing their aresanía, it’s essential that I work with the women of Callanca because all of the artisans are women. But Callanca is a very conservative and traditional place, the older married women will not even shake hands with an open hand, they offer you their fist, fingers down, and you grasp their wrist to greet them. So it’s a tricky situation to dance twice in one night with the same girl at a wedding or walk down the street alone with a woman. The next day everyone in town is saying that you’re novios.

So that pretty much eliminates 50% of the population as potential friends. The men work all day in the fields or at other jobs and when they gather socially they drink themselves into a stupor and fall asleep, so again this situation does not lend itself to deep and meaningful dialog. There are many exceptions to this rule but another stumblingblock to any orderly exchange of ideas is the Peruvian tradition of holding forth eloquently and at great length on the topic at hand, so even on the rare occasions when I find myself talking to a sober Callancano I often find myself listening rather than talking.

My conclusion is that probably we have way too much time on our hands in the U.S. and that communicating with people is a luxury and perhaps is a skill that one develops only after one has achieved a certain level of economic stability and formal education. The rest of the world couldn’t care less what we’re thinking or feeling.

I'm Raising Ducks

It’s true, I and the group of students writing a business plan for raising ducks continue our work on the business plan but now we’ve added actual ducks to the plan. My student Erick Eneque Mendoza bought twenty ducklings from his aunt for a little over 3 soles (a buck a duck) each. They were 18–20 days old when he bought them. Now they’re about a month old and weigh around half a kilo each, the females about 100 grams less than the males.

At a month old, they eat more or less two-and-a-half kilos of duck feed a day. “Duck feed” is a mixture of very coarsely ground corn, wheat, soybeans, vegetable oil, vitamins and minerals. It’s ground to about the coarseness of bird feed. Conveniently, ducks self-regulate their food intake, otherwise you’d have to measure out exactly 135 grams of duck feed and feed each duck individually. Instead you can measure out 135 grams times twenty ducks (two-and-a-half or three kilos) and dump that amount of feed into the feeder. They eat, and, when their body tells them they’ve ingested a day’s worth of protein, they stop eating. I can think of quite a few people who could benefit greatly from a duck-metabolism transplant. Ducks don’t drink beer, either. At least not much.

I’m beginning to believe that my students might continue to raise ducks whether or not they win the business-plan competition. (In August we present our business plan to a panel of judges comprised of Peace Corps and other business experts and the winners of the competition receive start-up funds for their businesses.) This is very satisfying for me. It means that they have not only a lot of faith in but also a lot of enthusiasm for the work we’ve done.

We’re getting into the duck-raising business at a difficult time. As you’ve probably read on the MSNews page while you’re trying to log into your e-mail account, the price of food worldwide is rising at a rather alarming rate. That means duck food as well. Eventually the price of duck meat, the product we’re selling, will rise along with the price of what ducks eat. But there will be resistance to that price hike. So we’re hoping that someone else fights that battle for us before we begin our business in earnest. We’ll be raising and feeding our 20 ducks for eight more weeks before we slaughter them and sell the meat. The price of duck meat as we speak is 14 soles a kilo (about $2.25 a pound) but we’re hoping it will rise to 15 soles or more by the time our ducks are due to meet their maker.

There’s a formidable market for duck in Callanca. Every Sunday the restaurants here feed several thousand tourists from nearby Chiclayo. Arroz con Pato, duck with rice, is the dish of choice. The restaurants need 350 kilos of duck every week. Your average duck yields about 2.5 kilos of meat. That means that to satisfy the restaurants’ weekly demand for duck we’d need to be slaughtering nearly 150 ducks a week. Since it takes three months to raise and fatten up a duck, that means that to have 150 ducks available for slaughter every week, we’d need to be raising 150 ducklings times 4 weeks in a month times 3 months, or 1800 ducks at a time, all the time. That’s some serious duck management, my friend. So we’re planning to start out small, slaughtering and selling maybe 35 ducks a week, raising 420 at any given time.

The particular duck that’s highly sought-after in these parts is pato criollo, which means a duck raised in rustic conditions, in corrals, rather than in a Purina-style factory fashion. A pato criollo is one that eats not only commercial feed but also bugs, table scraps, chopped alfalfa, sweet potatoes and the like. This diet gives the meat a better flavor and it’s that flavor that the restaurants are paying for when they pay 14 or 15 soles a kilo for their duck. The local species of duck is a species we call in the States Muscovy but its genetics are purely Peruvian, it’s not a descendent of the ducks that the Spaniards brought to Perú. It looks nothing like the white Donald Duck ducks we’re used to in the U.S. Instead it looks something like the Peking duck that’s sold in Chinese markets in New York City. In granola-speak we’d call it a “free-range” duck.

A mere 135–200 grams of food a day may not sound like much. But think of it this way, if I ate a comparable amount of food per day as a percentage of my body weight, I’d be eating nine pounds of food a day. I have to admit that I don’t weigh my food but I seriously doubt that I eat nine pounds of it a day. A fully grown duck drinks 600 mililiters of water a day. As a percentage of body weight, for me that would equal 12 liters or over three gallons. It’s no wonder that ducks grow at an impressive rate, maturing in 12 weeks, while a turkey, for example, raised under the same conditions, takes nearly a year to mature. This growth rate, plus its exceptional flavor and high nutritional value, makes duck not only a profitable but also an environmentally friendly food source. It’s been raised in Perú since before the time of the Incas as a staple of the campesino diet.

I’ll post some more pictures of our ducks as they enter adolescence and waddle into adulthood. And of course I’ll let you know how we do in the business-plan competition. Wish us luck, us and our ducks.

Los Ticos

I’ve been kind of busy, thus no word from me for awhile. The Peace Corps sent me to the Middle East to take care of a pesky job that’s been frustrating the government for forever. But that’s taken care of so now I’m back….

What else have I been up to? I’ve been teaching a business course to a group of young entrepreneurs. We’re studying basic business concepts and writing a business plan. In August we and twenty other groups under the tutelage of Peace Corps Small–Business Development volunteers will present our plans to a panel of judges chosen by Peace Corps and the winners of the competition will receive start-up funds for their businesses.

In April I and Fernando, a teacher at the public high school in Callanca, went to Lima to receive training in how to teach this course. Fernando is now teaching the course to 75 of his students at the high school and I’m teaching the course to a small group of older students from outside the high school. My group is deliberately small, four people, since one of the precepts of the course is that all participants should play an active role in operating the business. Fernando is fulfilling this requirement by dividing his classes into groups of five students. In July both Fernando and I will have finished business plans written by our students and we’ll offer the plans to a financial expert—an economist or an accountant—and that person will choose the better plan. That plan will be presented at the competition in August.

My group consists of Erick, a 23-year-old ex-soldier, currently unemployed but trying to keep busy by raising a few head of cattle; Jesús, 19 years old and a law student attending a university in Chiclayo; Gaby, 17 and—like many young women her age in Callanca—without work and with no money to fund a higher education; and Isabel, 18, from a family who runs one the “restaurantes campestres” here in Callanca.

Callanca, in spite of the fact that it’s only 15 minutes from Chiclayo, the capital of the departamento of Lambayeque, remains a very rural, agricultural community and so the kids chose wisely when they selected the theme for their business. They’re going to raise ducks.

This choice may sound odd to you but in Callanca and Lambayeque ducks are a hot commodity. That’s because Arroz con Pato (Duck with Rice) is the most popular dish in the Northern Peruvian cuisine. The country restaurants of Callanca serve up to 500 kilos of duck meat every week. That’s roughly 200 ducks. Someone has to raise all those ducks. We hope that that someone will be us.

Currently the restaurants are buying their ducks either from the Central Market in Chiclayo or from vendors from La Libertad, the departamento to the south of Lambayeque, who load up a Tico (a small Ford Fiesta–looking vehicle often used as a taxi here in Perú) or a combi (microbus) with as many ducks as it will hold and make visits to all the restaurants to sell to the owners. The reason that no one in Callanca is now providing this service seems to have to do with the initial investment involved. One would need at any one time around 600 ducks on hand in order to meet the weekly demand for 200 ducks from all the restaurants in town. Because the prize money for the contest in Lima in August will be 5,000 soles, we will have that initial capital to invest should we be one of the 3 or 4 winning groups in the competition.

As I teach this course I’m becoming a skilled PowerPoint presenter, something I’d have never expected to say of myself. I’m also learning a lot about how I probably should have run my business when I was designing books in the U.S. It turns out that I should have done a market study to find out if there was a demand for my service (there wasn’t). And I should have taken my competition into consideration and done some research in order to find out if there were already too many people providing the service (there were) and I should have carefully positioned my business in accordance with the four Ps of marketing, Product, Plaza, Price and Promotion, in order to assure that I was offering my service to the correct market segment. Instead I chose to offer a product that only a handful of people needed in a market far from New York, the hub of publishing activity, at a price that (though reasonable compared to New York prices) I was surprised that my customers were willing to pay and with no promotion whatsover except for a box of 500 business cards that lasted me for over twenty years. Yet somehow I managed to make a decent living for nearly three decades. At this point I choose to believe that it was in spite of my ignorance and not because of it that Charles Martin Graphics survived.

This time I and my group of students seem to be covering all these bases a lot more effectively than I alone ever did. We have a booming local market that no one else in town is taking advantage of, we can offer our product at the same price as our competitors, and we can promote our product by walking into any restaurant in Callanca and talking directly to the owner. On Mother’s Day over 9,000 people visited Callanca from Chiclayo and surrounding communities to treat their mothers to lunch in the country. That, my friend, is a shitload of ducks.

It’s a long haul from here to August. We’ll be studying business concepts until July and then writing our 35-page business plan until the beginning of August. The kids have chosen the name “Patos Callancanos, Tradición Peruana” for their business. “PCTP” makes a convenient nickname. The name seems like a good enough choice to me. And the important thing is that the students created it and chose it. It’s been difficult for me to let the students run the show. I of course feel like I could do everything better if I did it all myself—at least the marketing and promotion side of the business. I guess I spent too many years running a one-man show. So I’m learning along with the students, they by doing and I by not doing and by keeping my hands off.

Another project that’s keeping me busy is the Banco Comunitario “El Milagro” that my socio Gregoria Mechán and I started in April. This project makes me nervous. In Callanca dealing with money is always a dangerous undertaking. There’s not enough of it to go around and people behave unpredictably and uncharacteristically with sums of money, no matter how small, at stake.

The community bank consists of a group of 13 people, each of whom deposits from 5 soles to 15 soles a week in the bank. From these proceeds the bank offers one-month loans at an interest rate of 10% to participants in the bank. The bank has a fixed period of existence, in our case until December 1 so that the members can withdraw the funds to cover Christmas expenses. When the members liquidate the bank each member, based on the amount of his weekly deposit, will receive a percentage of the profits that have been generated by the repeated lending of the money. The idea is that all the money deposited in the bank should be lent continuously so as to earn as much interest and generate as much profit as possible.

Attendance at the weekly meetings has been a problem. Members would rather send their deposit with a friend or drop it off during the week at their convenience at the house where we’re holding the weekly meetings. But by doing so the members aren’t benefitting from the presntations on saving and borrowing practices that Gregorio and I are offering. Plus they’re not present to approve loans nor to ask for loans. All of which could lead to long-term problems for the bank. Due to attendance problems the offering of the first loans was delayed from week three until week five of the bank and of the 460 soles available to be lent only 300 soles in loans have been requested.

The concept of the community banks is a solid one. The credit available allows, say, an artisan to borrow money to buy materials to create products for an artisans’ fair. Ideally, the artisan then sells the artesanía at the fair and with the profits pays back the loan and interest. All of the funding for the bank comes from the depositors and all of the profits from the bank are shared by the depositors. No outside funding is necessary and the availability of small loans helps out the poorest segment of the population of the community, a group that would otherwise have no access to credit since the amount of money they’re borrowing isn’t large enough to interest an institutional bank. The community-bank idea was initiated and first carried out—with much success—by Peace Corps, Ecuador.

I’ll let you know how it works out in Peace Corps, Callanca.

I also helped stage a free medical campaign in Callanca on May 15. At the April training in Lima for participants in the Business Plan Competition I met a member of a Rotary Club International chapter from Huamachuco, La Libertad. He told me that Rotary Club sponsors campaigns offering free medical attention to deserving communities in Perú. He offered to contact the president of the Rotary Club chapter in Chiclayo and suggest that Rotary bring doctors to Callanca.

In late April I received a call from Esperanza, the president of Rotary Club Chiclayo Primavera. I met with her in Chiclayo and we planned the campaign, which was to feature an opthalmologist, a dentist, a general practitioner, a pediatrician and an obstetrition. Again, my socio Gregorio Mechán offered to help me with the project. Until January 1 Gregorio was Regidor (City Councilman) from Callanca in the Municipalidad de Monsefú. But his party was defeated in the elections in November so now he’s got time on his hands.

Gregorio and I found a location suitable for the doctors, publicized the event with papelotes (Peruvian PowerPoint) and supervised on the day of the event. The doctors brought medications from Chiclayo and an assortment of frames for eyeglasses. They donated the medications and frames. Patients who required glasses paid 20 soles (7 dollars) for the lenses. The campaign was successful but there were the usual number of prolems that one faces anytime one organizes an event in Perú. The general practitioner didn’t show up. Esperanza had told me that the opthalmologist would not offer treatment to patients suffering from cataracts or opaque vision, conditions common in Callanca because the majority of households cook with wood and the resulting smoke can cause vision problems. However, the opthalmologist did in fact offer to see these patients in Chiclayo and provide free care. But we’d already lost the opportunity to publicize this fact and invite individuals suffering from these vision problems to the event. The obstetritian forgot his blood-pressure gauge. We’d offered a free lunch of arroz con pato to the eleven people that Esperanza had said would be coming to Callanca with the medical team but when lunchtime arrived family and friends of the eleven people showed up in droves and we ended up having to pay for lunch for 25 people.

A hundred and fifty people turned out to take advantage of the free medical service. With 11 specialists at their disposition, these residents of Callanca, at least for a day, enjoyed a far more impressive patient-provider ratio than even the wealthiest communites in the U.S. It was fun while it lasted.

The dentist made the most enduring impression upon me. His patients sat in a white plastic chair while the dental assistant held the patient’s head still and the dentist shot the patient full of what must’ve been 100 cc’s of novacaine. The dentist waited a full 45 seconds for the novocaine to take effect and then dove in with a pair of pliers to perform the extraction. Extracion seemed to be the only service he was offering. I didn’t see any tools or materials that led me to believe that fillings were an option. To appreciate the spectacle you really needed to have been there to hear the sounds coming from the patients’ mouths—grunts and groans accompanied by the squeaking of the pliers and the crunching of bone. When it was all over the patients spit blood into a bucket and dentist handed them a prescription for painkillers, which I hope they filled as soon as possible.

At least it was free.

Besides all of the above, I’ve been up to my usual with the artisans, the restaurants, the medical post, the farmers and what (with luck) may one day become the Tourist Information Center of Callanca. I’ve designed an arch for the entrance to Callanca from the Panamericana; I’m helping a volunteer from Germany translate the menus of all the restaurants into English and German; I’m designing a brochure to promote tourism in Callanca; I’m preparing the artisans for a fair in Lima in July; I hawked the cuisine of Callanca at a Food Fair in Chiclayo last weekend and restaurants from Callanca won two third-place prizes and one second-place in their categories. In February, I and three girls from Callanca attended a three-day Peace Corps–sponsored camp for girls, Camp ALMA. A total of 100 girls attended the camp, all accompanied by Peace Corps volunteers from their communities. In March, Peace Corps celebrated its 50^th anniversary and all the volunteers in Lambayeque invited members of our communities to a celbration in Chiclayo. One hundred and fifty people showed up for the ceremony, including the mayor of Chiclayo and the Governor of Lambayeque.

So after 11 months in Perú some of the work is beginning to pay off. And in case you were wondering what a Tico looks like, here’s a picture of one and of some of the 9,000 people who visited Callanca on Mother’s Day.

One Hundred Percent Algodón Nativo

Another project I’m working on in Callanca involves algodón nativo or “native cotton” or “colored cotton.” Although it’s hard for us to imagine, it actually took quite a bit of dogged effort to breed a pure white cotton. Five thousand years ago cotton plants produced fibers of many colors—from beige and cream to rust red and dark brown and even gray-green and mauve. When dyes became prevalent these colors became superfluous and the words “cotton” and “white” became synonomous. The origins of some of the best strains of colored cotton—the cottons with the longest and finest fibers—have been traced to western South America. In other words to exactly where I am.

Up until 40 years ago they were still growing colored cotton here in Callanca. I met an artisan who still has in her house fat pillows of the stuff that her mother grew and used to weave blankets. It was a laborious process. First you had to pick the cotton, then clean the cotton of seeds and impurities, then spin the cotton by hand into hilo, a variety of thin yarn. Only then could you mount it on a loom and weave a paño or an alforja or a blanket. Today the artisans buy hilo in spools for 30 soles a kilogram. However this hilo “industrial” only comes in pure white and a range of gaudy reds, purples, greens, oranges and yellows. The colors of algodón nativo are much subtler and richer.

Marina with a blanket her mother wove from algodón nativo.

They still grow algodón nativo near Callanca in Mórrope, Túcume and Monsefú. So I’m hoping that I can work with these communities and with the district and regional governments to bring algodón nativo back to Callanca. There’s a meeting in the regional capital, Chiclayo, in early April at which many of the producers, consumers and supporters of algodón nativo in the region will be present. In June in Lima the State Department is sponsoring a forum on intellectual-property rights that will include a component on the protection of “indicaciones geográficas”—crops native to and specific to particular regions of Perú. I’ve spoken with a representative at the U.S. Embassy about algodón nativo and he wants one or two farmers or artisans from Lambayeque to attend the forum and to make a case for algodón nativo as a crop specific to our region and therefore deserving of international protections. In a sense Perú and Lambayeque could copyright algodón nativo.

Algodón nativo offers three advantages to Callanca. The farmers here have passed their land down through generations until its division through inheritances has reduced the amount of land owned by most farmers to an hectare (2.4 acres) or less. So the farmers really need a crop that pays better than the carrots, cucumbers, lettuce and sweet potatoes that most of them grow. Algodón nativo sells for a much higher price than any of these crops because of its rarity and also because it’s typically grown organically and for that reason commands a higher price in all markets, including especially the lucrative export market, a market that values the cotton for its utility in the manufacture of clothing that can claim to be produced from organically grown materials. A second advantage would be that if algodón nativo were available locally the artisans of Callanca could use it to weave the paños and alforjas that traditionally have been produced here. Again, the result would be a better price for their products because of the added value of the organic/natural label and the attractiveness of the colors. A third advantage is that the cotton is environmentally friendly and its cultivation would result in fewer toxic chemicals in Callanca’s soil and water.

An alforja woven from industrial cotton in Callanca.

This is a long-term project that involves convincing farmers to experiment with a new crop and artisans to choose a raw material that would mean more work for them if they decided to spin their own yarn or more expense if they decided to purchase industrial yarns produced in Lima from algodón nativo. But the potential for attracting more lucrative markets—exports for the farmers, tourist dollars for the artisans—makes algodón nativo an attractive option, at lease for the gringo Peace Corps volunteer if not for the members of his community as well.

The Bathroom is Occupied

The two little girls in the house where I live got tired of the gringo walking in on them when they were trying to take a piss. In my own defense I must say that the reason that the gringo walks in on them is that they don’t close the door to the bathroom while availing themselves of the facilities. Nor does their brother nor do their parents. I’m not sure how they themselves know that the bathroom is occupied but they seem to sense it. Because they’re all almost always downstairs while I’m sometimes upstairs in my room, perhaps they see that a person has entered the bathroom and know that it’s occupied. But Nicole and Pamela figured out a solution to the problem of the gringo. They made a sign with “baño ocupado” on one side and “baño desocupado” on the other side and attached string to the sign so that they could hang it up. But where? With the door open there was noplace convenient to hang the sign. It then occurred to them that if they closed the door they could hang the sign on the doorknob. So now the bathroom door is always closed, whether the bathroom is occupied or not, and the sign hangs on the doorknob, “baño ocupado” when someone is inside, “baño desocupado” when no one is inside. Unless someone forgets to change the sign when they leave the bathroom. Which is almost always the case.

Many problems in Callanca tend to get fixed in this manner. The main thoroughfare in Callanca remained unpaved until 2006. It was a tortuous and dusty (in the rainy season muddy) obstacle course of rocks and potholes. Six years ago they finally paved the main road. But in order to pave the road they had to bring in tons of fill and build a roadbed so that rains wouldn’t undermine the asphalt. So they heaped tons of dirt and gravel atop the old road through the center of town and laid the asphalt along this roadbed. And in the process they buried the entrances to half the houses in Callanca. Like New Englanders after a blizzard, the residents had to dig out their front doors and install rock or cement steps before they could again enter their own houses.

Which unfortunately brings me to the subject of artesanía in Perú.

As I’ve mentioned in previous entries, some of the artesanía in Callanca is of outstanding quality. The artesanía produced falls into several categories. Most common are bordados, embroidery. There’s bordado a mano (by hand) and a máquina (on a sewing machine). There’s also bordado en cinta (using ribbon instead of thread). Then there’s telar, weaving by means of a loom attached to the waist of the artisan. Also crochet, which is similar to the crochet that we’re used to in the U.S. except that it’s pronounced “kro-chet” instead of “kro-shay.” Have a look at some of the artesanía via the photos below.

Bordado a máquina.

Crochet.

Telar.

Bordado en cinta.

A few of the artesanas are capable of a type of embroidery called calado or richelieu (evidently named for the French Cardinal and arts patron of the 1600s, though nobody in Callanca admits to knowing where the name for this style of embroidery came from). This is beautiful stuff, see below. And remember this is done entirely on a manual Singer sewing machine, the old black machines with gold filigre and a wroght-iron foot treadle that some of us remember our parents or grandparents using in our youth. The artesanas employ this style of embroidery in the making of marinera dresses. I’ve spoken before of the marinera, the traditional dance, highly elaborate and melodramatic, of Northern Perú. The dresses more than match the bombastic quality of the dance itself.

They also weave sombreros from palm straw here in Callanca. This art is disappearing, I haven’t seen one person under the age of 40 or 50 doing this work. Maybe that’s because it takes a month to weave one hat. The hats equal in quality that of the famous “Panama” hats, which in fact come from Ecuador but who’s counting? Equal in quality means that you can pour water into the hat and it’s so tightly woven that it won’t leak. The male dancers of the marinera use the hats as part of their costume but that’s because they’ve been traditionally worn by many males in the campo of Northern Perú.

The artisans construct the hats around wooden hormas (cylinders made of the wood of the zapote tree) of three sizes, small, medium or large. The straw—or a variety of the straw called junco—used to be available in Callanca and Lambayeque. It grew along rivers, including the Río Reque here in Callanca. But junco has disappeared and now the artisans weave their hats with palm straw imported from Guayaquil in Ecuador.

All this sounds very romantic and charming. But for her month’s worth of work on that sombrero the artisan receives about 100 soles when she sells the hat to a wholesaler in Monsefú. That’s about $30. The local and national market for the other varieties of artesanía is equally bleak. An alforja (a variety of shoulder bag somewhat similar to a saddlebag, woven on a loom from cotton) also takes about a month to produce and sells for 100 soles or less. Even if you take into account that the artisans don’t work a full eight-hour day due to their other responsibilities—caring for children, cooking, cleaning, selling vegetables that their husbands raise in the market in Chiclayo—this works out to about thirty cents an hour according to my math. And this is for the creation of objects of art of indisputably high quality, as fine as any produced anywhere in South America or, arguably, the world.

This brings me back, if not literally to the bathroom, then at least to the subject of the bathroom. One of the reasons that the artisans don’t receive adequate compensation for their work is that they keep doing things the same way they’ve always done them and the way their mothers and grandmothers did them. They keep pissing with the door open in other words. And then when they try to remedy the unfortunate outcomes of their practices they do so in a way that often fails to take into account the real reasons for their dissatisfacions. Instead of closing the door they make a sign. Or they make a sign AND they close the door. Then they forget to change the sign, then they forget that there is a sign or they lose the sign, and then they decide that all this was ’way too much trouble and go back to leaving the door open.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, in fact I have very few of the answers, but as an outsider I can see the glaring mistakes in the artisans’ business practices a lot more clearly than they can because I arrived without (or with fewer) preconceived notions about the artesanía of Callanca. What you see below is called a paño. Paños traditionally have been offered as gifts at weddings in Callanca. The groom, the parents of the bride and groom and the godparents receive paños which they wear around their necks at the wedding celebration.

However, nowadays very few people are giving paños at their weddings. It’s a practice that’s seen as stodgy by younger people. They’d much rather receive a plasma TV set than a set of paños for the wedding party. So the local market for paños is not what it used to be. It’s much more likely that in the future paños will be sold as art objects rather than as wedding momentos. But the artisans continue to weave the paños in the same way they’ve always woven paños. The paños are extremely intricate and because they’re meant to be worn around the necks of their owners like scarves they always feature adorments at both ends. But since they’re unlikely to be worn around anyone’s neck since fewer and fewer people are buying them as wedding paraphernalia, it’s clear that the paños don’t need to be decorated at both ends. One could weave a much shorter paño with a single panel of decoration in the center and sell it at a much lower price or sell it for the same price and come much closer to realizing a reasonable return on one’s investment in time and materials.

Here’s a paño that I and the artisans are designing for Peace Corps’ 50^th Anniversary celebration. We’re hoping to produce it and sell it to Peace Corps as a memento to be presented to honored guests at the anniversary celebration in Washington this summer. If you bestow a gift that isn’t a paño upon someone who isn’t a Peruvian nor much less a Callancano at a celebration that isn’t a wedding then obviously you’ve lost quite a bit of the intent and the integrity of the original ritual. But who’s to say that if you help keep the practice of weaving alive the traditional exchange of paños or something like it might not someday return? It’s like keeping an endangered species alive in captivity. It’s not as good as the original but it’s a lot better than nothing.

See you later, I need to go take a piss.

Why Things Went South with Panchita

In the U.S. I spent a lot of my time daydreaming. Maybe that had to do with my professions—over the years I’d been a writer and a graphic artist. But for sure it’s a lot easier to listen to your iPod and believe that you can sing and play the guitar than it is to learn to sing and play the guitar. And it’s a lot easier to watch Andy Roddick play tennis than to go out and practice and play tennis at a respectable level. And I won’t even mention the daydreaming that goes on when one watches a movie starring (fill in the blank with the actress or actor of your choice).

I’ve noticed that in Callanca I don’t daydream much. I’m busy actually doing things and the things I’m doing have actual consequences. If they turn out badly I can’t punch Command-Z and reverse the errant move. When my brothers Dwight and Tommy and I played together when we were kids, if a wall of the Alamo happened to collapse and kill half of Colonel Travis’s garrison, we’d say, “Let’s play like that didn’t happen, OK?” and stand the soldiers upright and replace the fortifications and start over again. That kind of magical thinking doesn’t get you far in Perú.

I’m even finding it difficult to keep up-to-date with this blog because thinking and writing about what’s happening here seems so foreign to the fact of participating in my daily activities.

But then at the end of the day when I count up the number of things I’ve accomplished it doesn’t seem to be much. So maybe the impression that I’m not daydreaming and that I am instead working a lot is in itself a daydream?

I visited Trujillo, in the neighboring department or state of La Libertad, for Peace Corps training and during my stay there I introduced myself to the proprietors of a couple of shops that sell the elaborate dresses that women in the north of Perú wear when they dance the marinera, the dramatic courtship dance that I described in another of my entries. A few artisans in Callanca embroider blouses, petticoats and handkerchiefs for marinera outfits. They sell them to middle men in nearby Chiclayo or Monsefú or Lambayeque and these merchants take them to Trujillo and sell them at a sixty percent markup. So my idea was to eliminate the middle man—offer our dresses directly to merchants in Trujillo.

So after contacting the Trujillo vendors I returned to Callanca and talked to several artisans with the ability and experience to produce embroidery that will satisfy the market in Trujillo. I found three willing to spend the money (34 soles or $12.50) to travel to Trujillo with me. The women worked on samples to take with them to show to the merchants. We picked a day to travel.

Two days before we were to leave I called one of the merchants to confirm that she’d be in Trujillo on the day we planned to arrive. She said she’d be out of town that day and so couldn’t meet with us. So I returned to Callanca, informed the artisans, and we’re trying to agree on another date when the three of them can travel and when the merchants are likely to be in Trujillo and not elsewhere at an artisan’s fair or business meeting.

That’s the way I spend most of my days. Doing things and undoing things sort of like Penelope with her weaving while she was waiting for Odysseus to get back from Troy.

The trip to Trujillo will eventually happen. The artisans will go with me, all three, two out of three, or maybe three different artisans. The merchants might or might not be in Trujillo on the day and at the hour that they say they’ll be there. We might or might not get a better price in Trujillo than we’re getting in Lambayeque. If we get the better price, the merchant that offers it might or might not pay it once the artisans embroider the merchandise. One just never knows.

Another example of one just never knowing: I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting fed properly with the family with which I’m living. They eat lunch at 2:30 in the afternoon and dinner at 10 o’clock at night. Even though they own a bodega they’re often out of food, staples like vegetables or cheese (or any other source of protein). So I arranged with a neighbor family to eat with them and to pay them what I’ve been paying my current host family. The health post helped me to arrange the deal.

I met with the family, we agreed on a meal schedule and a price, and I showed up on the first of the following month for breakfast. The breakfast was delicious and served at a breakfastlike hour. But when I’d finished eating and offered her the money for the month’s pension, Panchita, the neighbor, told me that she’d gotten an unexpected job offer from the jardín (kindergarten) and wouldn’t be able to cook on account of her duties at the school.

I knew that this could mean any of a number of things but that one of that number of things likely was not a new job at the kindergarten. The most likely possibilities were these: 1) Margot, the mother at the house where I’m living, had talked to Panchita and had told her that she was not happy with Panchita for bird-dogging her gringo; 2) the husband of Jackeline, Panchita’s daughter and the person who would have have been cooking for me on days when Panchita couldn’t, was jealous and did not want Jackeline spending time with the girngo; or 3) I wasn’t offering them enough plata to make the deal worthwhile for them given the potential problems with Margot and/or Jackeline’s husband.

It turned out that the problem was probably none of the above. It’s most likely that Gregorio, a neighbor who’s a relative of Panchita and who lives between my family’s house and Panchita’s house, got wind of the plan and went to Panchita and told her not to get involved in the care and feeding of the gringo. Gregorio is a good friend of the family with whom I’m living and was responsible for negotiating my living arrangement with the Peace Corps in the first place. He probably felt that it would reflect badly on him if I jumped ship on this family.

I’ll probably never know the real reason why things went south with Panchita.

As I said, I spend most of my time here arranging things and then unarranging them or watching while someone else unarranges them without my knowledge. Perhaps I don’t spend every day daydreaming because in Callanca every day is in itself a daydream of sorts.

“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?”