La Municipalidad de Callanca

Something pretty earth-shaking took place in Callanca on September 26. A letter arrived from the Provincial Government announcing that it was ordering elections to be held in Callanca for a mayor and city council. That means that Callanca will be metamorphizing from a Centro Poblado into a Municipalidad.

It’s hard to explain to an American what that actually means since there are no Municipalidades in America. Or it would better to say that everyplace is a Municipalidad in the U.S. Even the tiniest towns have a mayor and some form of town government. It’s not that way in Perú. Most towns are very small caseríos with little or nothing in the way of what we would call a government., sometimes not even a school. They depend entirely on the Distrito, which is sort of like what we’d call a very small county in the U.S. I’m not sure what the official definition of a caserío is, but judging from the ones I’ve seen I’d say it’s a community of fewer than 1,000. Communites slightly larger qualify as Centro Poblados. Most Centro Poblados are also dependent on the government and budget of their Distrito and don’t have a mayor (alcalde), city council (regidores) or courthouse (municipio), police station (comisaría), park (plaza) or much of anything else of their own. They’re sort of like a neighborhood within a city: an identifiable entity, often with its own name, but with no autonomy of any kind.

The caseríos and centro poblados are sort of like satellites of a larger city that’s a Municipalidad Distrital or Distrito or, in English, obviously, “district.”

In Perú they divide up geography and to some extent government in this way: Departamento (think “state”), Province (a concept that doesn’t exist in the U.S. but imagine Northern California and Southern California with their own independent governments), Distrito (something like “county”), Centro Poblado (maybe “township” would be close) and Caserío (Podunk or Wide Place in the Road). In terms of government as opposed to geography those last three are often lumped together as a Distrito (“district”), a largish city of maybe 30,000, one or two Centro Poblados of 1–5,000 people and several tiny caseríos. But if a Centro Poblado has enough population and independence it can solicit from its Provincial Government and District Government permission to become its own Municipalidad and elect its own officials and begin to take charge of its own institutions—schools, police, sanitation, etc. “Municipalidad” is a term that exists solely at the level of government, not as a geographical term. That is, Monsefú (our Distrito) is both a Distrito and a Municipalidad; Callanca will be both a Centro Poblado and a Municipalidad. “Municipalidad” indicates the presence of a government, a mayor and a council. So Callanca will be what’s called a Municipalidad de Centro Poblado. One day, if it acquires the requisite institutions and services, it can become its own Distrito. But first things first.

In order to hold elections we have to register everyone over 18 to vote. This is no simple task. Here one’s vote is a much more important right and duty than in the U.S., where we offer people the opportunity to register to vote and if you don’t register, tough luck, you don’t vote and that’s your loss. But in Perú you get fined if you don’t vote and the goal is to achieve 100% participation the process. There’s even a line about voting in the national anthem, “y antes niegue sus luces el sol, que faltemos el voto solemne.” The sun will give up its right to shine before we give up our right to vote. This makes the job of registering voters a lot more difficult. We have to go door to door and write down the names of everyone in the house eighteen or older and their DNI, national identification-card number. This is exactly as difficult as it sounds and as difficult as it would be in your town were you required to go door to door and write down everyone’s name and social security number. What are the odds that they’ll all be home at the same time or that the ones at home will know the SS#s of those who aren’t at home? So we leave a blank form and ask people to write down names and DNIs and we come back a day or two later and pick up the forms. When we finish with a house we put a sticker on the door, “casa empadronada.”

This would be slow and tedious but not impossible in a town of 5,000 in the U.S. We’d divide up streets and neighborhoods among the available election workers, hand out the forms, pick up the forms and cross the addresses off our list. But this is Perú. In Callanca there are no street names, much less house numbers. The election workers forget to take tape or stickers with them and so don’t mark the houses that have been empadronado, they fill in the names of the people in the houses but don’t write down their DNI, they skip houses, they don’t empadronar houses in order, they forget in which houses they left blank forms and so never go back to pick them up, they write down names and DNIs of people under 18 years of age, and they generally advance a process that’s a textbook example of entropy if not outright chaos.

Since other Centro Poblados in Perú have achieved Municipalidad status, I’m assuming we’ll somehow get through this registration ordeal. Here things frequently work out in unexpected ways. A few weeks or months from now someone might say, “Oh yeah, I forgot, we can ask the government for a list of the DNIs of everybody in Callanca.” Things have to work out in unexpected ways because expectations as we know them are few and far between. Planning just does not happen here. Other volunteers have told me that it’s a product of our educations that we’re able to imagine outcomes abstractly and to have faith in those abstractions. “This is a design for a business card. It will cost you 50 soles to print 500 of these. If you print the business card and hand it out to potential customers, some of them will call you back and order artesanía because they will remember meeting you and seeing the quality of your artesanía and the picture on the card will remind them of you and your products and the list of services printed on the card will remind them of the kinds of artesanía you produce. If you get even one order thanks to the cards, the income from that order will pay for printing the cards. So print the cards!” That argument makes sense to us. We can imagine the steps involved and we see the business cards as a wise investment. We’ve also seen business cards and other forms of promotion work for other people. But often people in Callanca, because they only may have finished second or third grade, don’t have much confidence in predictions. They would rather spend the 50 soles on materials and buy enough materials to produce 200 soles worth of artesanía that they can sell right now instead of spending the 50 soles on business cards and generating potentially thousands of soles worth of income in the long term. When we were petitioning for the Municipalidad, a woman in Chiclayo who runs a major tour company and who was helping us with the campaign for a Municipalidad actually put forth the proposition that we should be able to collect 4,000 signatures in a week. Clearly she was not envisioning the steps in the process. After a month of work we managed to collect fewer than 500 signatures. And then it turned out that we didn’t need the signatures anyway, the Municipalidad was approved without the submission of any petitions.

A recently formed Municpalidad de Centro Poblado near Callanca, Pampa Grande, also a community of 5,000 people, took three months to complete its voter registration and about 1,300 of the 2,500 or so eligible voters managed to register and vote in their elections. So I’m expecting a similar result here in Callanca.

In spite of the headaches, I’m proud to have been a part of the process of forming the Municipalidad. It’s something that nearly everyone in Callanca wants and has wanted for years. My counterparts in the community understand the legal ins and outs of the formation of the Municipalidad much better than I do and so they did the great majority of the work in petitioning for the Municipalidad. At the same time I made significant contributions to the project, including carrying the paperwork to the Municipalidad Distrital and presenting it to the Alcaldesa and participating in the meeting with the Alcaldesa that led to her eventually approving the formation of the Municipalidad de Callanca. I’d been in many such meetings where unlimited promises were made and zero results ensued (and we gringos are good at imagining disappointing outcomes as well as profitable ones) so it was I who thought to ask for a document at the end of the meeting, a document expressly stating that the District was recommending that the process of forming a Municipalidad de Callanca move forward. This, according to the Peace Corps Handbook, is how Peace Corps is supposed to work. The needs arise from the community and the community—with the volunteer working alongside them and pestering them and complaining and warning them about the terrible things that are going to happen if they fail to plan well—satisfies its own needs. That way when the volunteer leaves the needs of the community can continue to be met and the voice of Carlitos—complaining and pestering and warning and saying if you don’t plan well terrible things are going to happen to you—stays with them forever. For better or for worse.

We Won! Now What?

So we won the business-plan competition in Lima and I’m now a poultry magnate. Or at least I’m the business consultant for a group of poultry magnates. The business plan for Patos Callancanos, Tradición Peruana, our duck-raising enterprise from Callanca, won first prize at the entrepreneurship competition sponsored by Peace Corps in Lima in August and will receive start-up funds of 5,500 soles ($2000) to help initiate the business.

Jesús and Erick, the two young men who went with me to Lima and who presented the plan, looked consummately professional—much better than I did, as a matter of fact—and represented the plan accordingly. I spoke with the judges afterward and they thought our plan was outstanding and even offered to provide counsel in the future should we need it as we begin our enterprise. And considering what I personally know about raising ducks, I guarantee that we’re going to need it.

So even though I bitched and moaned from beginning to end about this project, it will likely change forever the lives of the participants from Callanca, so who can complain in good conscience even for one minute in light that?

Nineteen groups prsented business plans and two earned first prizes, two second prizes and two third prizes. Among the other prize winners were a guinea–pig raising operation (as I’ve mentioned many times, they eat them here), a business selling artesanía and T-shirts, a producer of natural candies and an organic-fertiizer producer.

Now we have to go back to Callanca and actually start the business. This could be challenging. One member of our team will be studying to take the university entrance exam to study nursing. Another team member is a law student. Can you imagine being a law student in the U.S. and raising poultry on the side? I can’t. The third team member, Erick, is 100% on-board and available. He may be the one who actually does all the work. But money is a strong motivator and maybe with 5,500 soles on the line, everybody will come around.

Callanca as a community is delighted and since this is a tangible achievement it makes me look very good indeed. Later, people may start coming to me to ask why they weren’t included in the project, why one of their children can’t join the project (now that the money has arrived), why I didn’t do anything for them or for their families, etc. But for now I can enjoy our accomplishment and rest for awhile. Judith is visiting from the U.S. and we’re on vacation in Piura, Cajamarca and Las Amazonas until the end of August.

The logistics of raising ducks in Perú could prove to be daunting—finding and maintaining a reliable source for ducklings, for instance (one buys them at 12–21 days and raises them for three months before slaughtering them and selling the meat). Few sources of anything are stable or reliable in Perú and we need ducks very week in order to fulfill orders from the restaurants of Callanca, which feed Arroz con Pato to thousands of tourists from Chiclayo every weekend.

As would be the case in the U.S., regulations could be a problem. The process of turning live ducks into dead ducks will generate impressive quantities of refuse, feathers and duck guts, and we will need to dispose of same in a responsible manner. It’s not clear what kind of conditions we’ll need to maintain in the area where we slaughter the ducks. Refrigeration? This doesn’t seem to be an issue in the public markets here. They sell chickens and turkeys and their carcasses hang in the market stalls from dawn till dusk without a passing glance from their tiny, tightly shut eyes at a refrigerator or a hunk of ice. I suppose there must be some equivalent of what we’d call a visit from the Health Inspector. But how rigorous an inspection this might turn out to be, we can’t yet say. We don’t fear the official regulations as much as we fear the inspector himself. It’s common in these matters for the public official to solicit a little something for his own pocket before your establishment begins to look clean enough to him.

Some in the U.S. will undoubtedly excoriate us for being heartless duck murderers. Vegetarians can condemn us with some justification, or at least they make a consistent and unhypocritical argument since they themselves don’t eat meat. But the rest of us, those who do eat meat, eat the meat of animals raised and slaughtered by someone and our business accepts that someonehood in what we hope will be a reasonably responsible manner. Our aim is to raise our ducks in conditions that Peruvians call “criollo”—what we would call “free-range” in the U.S. So at least our ducks will die happy, having lived a full and fairly rewarding—though brief, 14 or 15 weeks—life and not having suffered under cramped and inhumane conditions such as those we associate with Perdue and KFC in the U.S. We’re more or less a microbrewery and not an Anheiser-Busch in the world of duck production. As such we hope to deliver quality on a large scale and quantity on a lesser scale.

Ninety-nine percent of Peruvians wouldn’t even begin to comprehend such an arcane (some would say “refined”) concept as animal rights. At least here in Lambayeque they happily eat every morsel of protein they can get their hands on. When they finish a chicken leg it looks like the remains of a chicken leg exposed to the desert sun in Arizona for a year.

The guts and gore of this process don’t seem to faze Jesús or Erick in the least. Isabel, the other member of the group forming the business, is a bit more squeamish, as am I, but Isabel will oversee other aspects of the operation—and there will be many such aspects. We buy ducklings in Chiclayo at the public market. We bring them to Callanca aboard public transportation (yes, I’ll be among those Latin Americans infamous among U.S. tourists for carrying their pigs and chickens on the bus). We let loose the ducklings in a large corral made of rustic mateirals like wild cane and carizo, a tall weed with a thick, woody stem. We feed them a mixture of finely chopped vegetables, corn, and other protein-rich grains and meals available at the public market. They grow quickly and after 12 weeks they’re ready to slaughter. We pluck them, eviscerate them and sell the meat for 14 soles a kilo ($2.30 a pound) to the sixteen restaurants of Callanca, which use 800 pounds of duck a week in a dish called Arroz con Pato, Duck with Rice (rice cooked in dark beer with chopped spinach and cilantro). It’s tasty I guarantee you.

The process is a repetitive and cumulative one. We buy a group of ducks every week. We fatten each group for three months. So every week there’s a new group of unlucky ducks ready to slaughter and sell plus eleven groups passing through previous stages in the 12-week process. The businesspeople among you will note that, because we have to raise the ducklings three months before selling them, the first three months of our business are looking mighty bleak in terms of profitability. That’s where the prize money from the competition comes in. Because we won the 5,500 soles we have the funds to weather those three profitless initial months. That’s why we’re able to initiate this potentically very lucrative business while others can’t. “Lucrative” in this case means 800 pounds of duck times $2.30 a pound equals a potential of $2,040 in income per week or $8,160 a month or $97,920 a year. That’s chump change for most American businesses but a fortune in Callanca.

We raised 20 ducklings as an experiment while we studied business principles and wrote our business plan. On my birthday, September 24, we’re conducting our taste test. You’re cordially invited.

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.