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?”

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.