The Perfect is the Enemy of the Half-Assed

Because I felt like I should be a part of at least one Peace Corps cliché during my years as a volunteer, I decided to build a school.

That’s a slight exaggeration. First of all, there was already a school there, though not mucho of one. Second, I had a lot of help from a lot of people so it definitely was not “I” who built the school; however, it’s true that thanks to nearly two years of experience as a volunteer I was prepared this time to orchestrate events instead of being dragged along helplessly behind random developments that I never could have imagined much less controlled. Here’s what the kindergarten “Los Girasoles” (Sunflowers) looked like before, during and after:

It started out as a renovation but because of the sorry shape the building was in we completed gutted it and started over. My friend, the Teniente Gobernador, Aldo Rodríguez, happens to be an albañil (bricklayer) so he donated his time to the project and we solicited materials from the Municipalidad, an NGO in Chiclayo, the Ladrillera (brick factory) in Callanca and from James D. Turner, a gringo who founded a school here along with his friend Enrique Pisfil Villalobos, a Callancano now living in the U.S. I managed the budget and purchased materials, Aldo and the crew he normally works with did the real work.

Since this is Callanca, naturally there were people who opposed the project. They could think of bad things to say, even about a project that benefited three-, four- and five-year-olds. The Eneques, the people next door, claimed that one of the walls of the school belonged to them. They waited until we’d plastered the wall and were ready to pour the concrete floor, then showed up to complain bitterly in spite of the fact that we’d filled up all the gaping holes in “their” wall and stabilized the wall so that it wouldn’t collapse on top of them. They demanded that we build another wall abutting the existing wall. Panchita, the owner of the property on which the school is built, came with her brother and uncle to talk with them. The opposing factions yelled at each other for two hours and stalked around the perimeters of the adjoining buildings pointing to imaginary property lines and recounting contradictory versions of how their great-grandfathers had constructed the hundred-year-old adobe wall dividing the two houses. Just when everything looked hopelessly deadlocked they came to an agreement and the work on the school continued.

I learned some very important lessons in helping to carry out this project. One, if you invite the Alcaldesa (the Mayor) to the dedication of the project before you ask her to donate materials she’ll always say yes because Alcaldesas love nothing more than to hand out a few bags of cement, show up at the dedication and take credit for the entire project. On a similar note, I saw reconfirmed a lesson I’d learned previously. Everyone wants his name on the project. So if you generously concede credit for the success of a project to as many other people as possible you’ll get much better cooperation. When the project’s finished you can walk away from it with the personal satisfaction of knowing exactly how much you yourself contributed and how much more difficult the project would have been without your participation and that’s ultimately enough reward for anyone. (Anyone except an Alcaldesa.)

That willingness to share the credit ended up paying off. The Alcaldesa, two Regidores (Counselmen) from the Municipalidad, the Chief of Police and another official from the Muni ended up coming to the inaguaration. Thirty or forty padres de familia (PTA) and neighbors were present as well. As Madrina and Padrinos the Alcaldesa and Regidores donated 170 soles (when they they bless the building they break a bottle of champagne hanging in the doorway and tie money into a ribbon decorating the neck of the champagne bottle).

Another important lesson: when the gringo controls the money the project comes in under budget and there’s even money left over to invest in future projects. Instead of ending up in the pockets of every official, foreman, manager or accountant who comes anywhere near it, the money actually gets spent on the project. What a concept.

Those of you who know us know that I and my brothers have been known to be something of a clique of perfectionists. (To put it mildly.) One very difficult lesson I’ve had to learn in el Perú is that the perfect is not only the enemy of the good but also the enemy of the “half-assed but it’ll do.” This project like all the others in which I’ve been involved in Callanca had its rough edges and its cut corners. Because school vacation was ending and the kids were coming back to school, the crew rushed toward the end and although things got done they didn’t get done with as much care as had been the case earlier on in the renovation. Also, Aldo Rodriguez, my counterpart, who’d promised to everyone who’d listen that he would work for nothing and donate his time, in the end asked to be paid for his work once he saw that there’d be a budget surplus. So it goes. All projects and all people have their defects. I certainly am well acquainted with all the areas of my own character that are held together with black electrician’s tape or painted in two slightly but noticeably different colors of orange. Now that I’m learning to accept those imperfections in my work and in those with whom I work here in Perú, it’s a little easier to consider accepting similar imperfections in myself.

Not much easier but a little.

Hecho en Perú

We finally got the prize money for the duck business on January 8 and at this point we have 120 ducks fattening in our corrals. In case you’re interested in a couple, I happen to know that they travel well. We bought 80 from Patos del Norte, an outfit near Lima, and they shipped the ducklings to us by airplane. The tickets were really expensive, they were heard to say when they arrived, and the seatbelts way too big. Actually, they came in a cardboard carton 80 cm x 40 x 12 with holes punched in the lid and sides. It was small enough that I could carry it with me on the combi. (This is one of the great things about Peace Corps—no longer are you a tourist observing the poor campesino who brings his pig or chicken with him on the bus, you yourself are the campesino with the duck.)

We’d previously bought 40 ducks at a livestock market in Chiclayo but they turned out to be of unidentifiable ages and of dubious genetic purity to say the least. Some of them were sick and infected others in the flock so it cost us time and money to get them all healthy again and growing fat at a steady rate.

Meanwhile we bought these 80 genetically selected critters from Patos del Norte and so far they’re responding in a manner befitting their bloodlines. They were just days old when they arrived and therefore somewhat delicate. They needed to be kept warm at night so we installed lightbulbs for that purpose. The light also keeps them active and eating so that they recover quickly from the trauma of the airplane ride. They’ve doubled in weight since their arrival, which is not saying a whole lot since they only weighed 100 grams, but at least it’s a sign that they’re healthy. Patos del Norte warned us that almost surely some would die but so far they’re all alive except for one—that one the nightwatchman accidentally stepped on.

Which is something of a potent metaphor for this entire business operation: the principals in the enterprise, Erick, Jesús and Jesús’s mother, Iris, cause most of their own problems, undoubtedly with some considerable amount of assistance from their advisor, yours truly. The guys and Iris sometimes forget to give the ducks food or water, separate the sick ducks from the healthy ducks, mix the new ration before the old ration runs out or construct pens large enough to accommodate all the ducks we’ve ordered or plan to order. But now that the new ducks have arrived and are properly housed and reacting well to their surroundings, Jesús, Erick and Iris are beginning to see that good planning and proper attention to the animals’ needs pay off—the first flock of forty may turn out to be “a learning experiece” as we in the U.S. say of utter or near disasters.

The ducklings will need 10 weeks (females) and 12 weeks (males) to reach an optimal weight and at that point we hope to sell them “vivo”—still alive and with all their feathers. Otherwise we’re in for a lot of work slaughtering and plucking 80 ducks. The market for live animals is rumored to be good. A neighbor already offered to buy fifty from us for his niece’s wedding. That might sound like an excessive number of fowl but if you’d ever been to a wedding in Callanca you’d understand. They last three days and 150–500 people show up to eat and drink and dance. They usually slaughter one or two steers, several goats, ten turkeys and around fifty ducks in order to feed all the guests, many of whom don’t even bother to come to the wedding or the reception, they show up in shorts, a T-shirt and thongs and wait to be handed their arroz con pato in a styrofoam take-out container.

If we don’t end up selling them to the father of the bride, pickup trucks from Chiclayo come through Callanca every few weeks as well looking for criollo (free-range) ducks to buy. Callanca is known for breeding tasty specimens of this hardy breed, that can survive and thrive in extremely rustic conditions, fed on just about any form of ration, from grated sweet potatoes, lettuce and alfalfa to scientifically formulated feed like the mixture we’re employing. It’s a combination of coarsely ground corn, wheat and soybeans, soybean oil and powdered vitamins and minerals. We mix the ingredients on a tarp, shovel it into feed sacks, store it and dispense it daily to the animals. In 12 weeks a male duck will eat 13 kg (28 lbs) of feed. That’s 866 kilos of feed (just short of a ton) for a flock of 80 males and females at a cost of around 1,100 soles or $400. The ducklings cost 4 soles apiece ($1.25 or $100 for 80). We can sell the 80 fully grown ducks for an average of 35 soles apiece ($13) or $1000 and change so our profit margin can approach 50% if we manage our other (non-feed) costs well. “Other costs” will or might include: vaccinations, other medicines, transportation of the animals and their feed, electricity for those night lights, etc.

Will we manage those other costs well? Your guess is as good as mine. The prize money we won should cover all of our infrastructure costs—the cost of corrals, a scales, troughs and tubs for food and water, electrical materials, etc.—plus the cost of ducklings and feed for 12 weeks, at which point we will sell our first flock of fully grown ducks and begin to see our first income. Remember I said: “should cover….”

The concept of a rigorous business plan is a very new one in Callanca and for that matter in most rural areas of Perú. For that reason Jesús and Erick and Iris only half believe that good planning will have any effect whatsover on the fate of their enterprise. While that seems outrageous to me it’s not really that outrageous given what they’ve experienced. You buy good seed, you plow deep, you plant straight and rain from the sierra rampages down the river bed and washes it all away. Your family scrimps and saves to send your sister to the best colegio in Chiclayo and she gets pregnant at fifteen. You invest 5,000 soles in raising a flock of turkeys and the week before you plan to sell them somebody steals them all in the middle of the night while you’re at your cousin’s wedding. Planning doesn’t mean to a rural Peruvian what planning means to a college graduate from a middle-class family in the U.S. So I get very frustrated sometimes. I tell the guys over and over that they have to separate the 3-week-old ducks from the 6-week-old ducks because they eat different amounts and because the older ducks will not allow the younger ducks to eat their share, but they don’t listen and it seems like they have no intention of separating the ducks until finally one day I show up and the ducks are in separate pens. They do things according to their own internal clocks and those clocks certainly are by no means Swiss watches but instead are stamped “Hecho en Perú.” Undoubtedly there will be many more learning experiences; realistically I don’t expect Erick and Jesús to change completely nor do I necessarily believe that they should. We’ll no doubt end up with a business that’s something of a hybrid. Something more than a flock of scrawny yardbirds living in a pen of sticks and eating bugs and table scraps; and something less than a criollo Frank Perdue operation for superducks. Since in the end I’m not sure that either of those extremes represents the best outcome one could hope for, I’ll gladly accept something in the middle.

I told you so, Yung Mei

You’ll be pleased or perhaps utterly stunned to find out that I recently received Peace Corps Perú’s Volunteer Excellence Award, an award which recognizes (and I quote) “outstanding volunteers based on five main criteria: primary project success; secondary project success; leadership; collaboration with other Volunteers and with counterparts and host country agencies; and integration in the community.” Because volunteer turnover is frequent given that volunteers serve only two years, Peace Corps Perú doesn’t hand out yearly awards, instead they select two volunteers every trimester to receive Volunteer Excellence Awards. I and a truly deserving volunteer from Arequipa, Rocío Ramírez, received the first two Volunteer Excellence Awards for 2012.

My theory is that they took pity on me for being 59 years old and a diabetic.

Kim Ayers, the volunteer who nominated me, concocted this bit of hyperbole on my behalf: “Charles Martin shows just how much impact a Peace Corps Volunteer can have in a community. While undertaking significant Small Business Development projects, he has done so much additional community development work outside his primary project area that many Callancanos tease that he is the Alcalde Delegado for this distant sector of the Monsefú district. He is a primary trainer for the Artisan Association of Callanca, and with his assistance in networking, the artisans and their products in embroidery and weaving have been featured in the popular restaurants in Callanca, as well as important artisan fairs in Loja, Ecuador and Exhibe Perú in Lima (and as despedida gifts for the Peru 14ers!). Charles also works with Callanca’s restaurant corridor to improve their marketing and promote municipal water & sanitation projects that are so crucial to the success of this fast-growing gastronomía destination. While executing these projects, Charles also managed to find time to set up a community bank with the artisans and to conduct Somos Emprendedores, Somos Perú youth entrepreneurship classes. His group’s plan to raise criollo ducks to sell to the Callanca restaurants won first place in the Somos Emprendedores competition in Lima. Additionally, Charles has assisted local producers of native colored cotton to patent their products. Through all of his work in artesanía, restaurants, water & sanitation, youth entrepreneurship and other small business projects, as well as his patience and cheerfulness, Charles has won the affection, respect, and gratitude of Callanca. Charles is deeply esteemed not only for the projects he has advanced, but the manner in which he advances them, empowering Callancanos of all ages to take control of their lives and improve their living situations. Charles often accompanies Callancanos to the Municipality of Monsefú to show his support for their project requests, and has been very influential in ensuring that all designated funds reach their intended beneficiaries. Volunteers and Callancanos alike wish to publicly express our gratitude for Charles’ support, hard work, and dedication to the Peace Corps mission.”

Please copy to Yung Mei Holaski, the Peace Corps, Washington Placement Officer who told me that she wasn’t convinced that I was applying to Peace Corps for the right reasons and tried to send me to the Ukraine.

How do you say “I told you so” in Ukranian?

October or November?

I’ve been really busy so haven’t had any time to blog, journal, diary, broadside, screed, Post-It or otherwise turn nouns into verbs. It looks like October or November may have been the last time I wrote anything. I’m not sure if I can even remember what all has happened since then.

For Christmas, I visited Tarapoto, which is in the mountains but on the eastern slopes of the Andes, which means it’s technically jungle. Here’s what it looks like in the selva alta:

In Tarapoto everyone owns a motorcycle. I saw a guy riding down the street, his wife behind him on the bike, breast-feeding her baby and talking on her cellphone.

It was a true pleasure seeing a green landscape for a change. Things are very brown here in the desert in Lambayeque.

Before I left for Tarapoto I and my socios from Callanca put together a bunch of “chocolatadas”, six or seven of them, in fact. These are Christmas celebrations at which children are served chocolate, panetón (a light version of fruitcake) and, if the budget allows it, chicken or empanadas. Inexpensive toys are also distributed. If a Peace Corps volunteer did nothing else in his two years of service besides arrange chocolatadas, he’d leave his community a hero. Chocolatadas are the “bread and circus” of el Perú.

By the way, in Perú any celebration or especially fundraising event gets assigned the suffix “ada”. For this reason “chocolatada” (a celebration where chocolate is served), “cabritada” (where they serve goat), “pollada” (chicken).

Other highlights of the last couple of months: we finally got the funds for our duck-raising business. Remember? I taught a business course to a group of young adults and the group wrote a business plan. We presented the plan at a contest in Lima and won first prize. So now it’s time to put up or shut up and last week we bought our first “camada” of ducklings. We will feed them for two to three months, then slaughter them and sell the meat to the many “restaurantes campestres” here in Callanca, which are visited on weekends by hundreds to thousands of city folk from nearby Chiclayo. We buy a new batch of ducklings every week so as to have product ready on a regular basis.

I’ve also invested in a “salchipollo” stand and am working with María and Carla, the two women who own it, to turn it into a functioning small business. At first things did not look promising. They bought the cart and then it turned out that they had no money left to buy chicken or any of the other staples necessary to prepare salchipollo (chicken wings) or hamburguesas. They couldn’t even afford a tank of propane with which to fire up their deep frier. For about a week our efforts amounted to a “nadada”, an event at which nothing, is served.

However, after a few days of selling “raspadillas”—Peruvian snow cones—they put together enough capital to buy some chicken and potatoes and since then they’ve not looked back. After two weeks they were able to pay me 100 soles of the 300 soles I loaned them to start their business. They actually could’ve paid me all of it but I encouraged them to keep some of the money to reinvest. Now they’re also selling cachangas, fried dough with a cheese filling, and champú, a hot beverage made from ground corn. They hope to start serving lunches in the near future.

When I got back from Tarapoto, Callanca was celebrating its día patronal, el Festival de San Benito de Palermo. This is a week-long festival that culminates in the veneration of a small statue of San Benito and a dance featuring a nationally known cumbia band, this year Agua Marina.

The most poplular attraction at the Festival are the “negritos”, cross-dressing masked pranksters who dance to marinera and other regional music and tease onlookers with bawdy insults and insinuating remarks delivered in squeaky falsetto. The negritos are part of a “carnaval”-like tradition, the profane giving way to the sacred (first the negritos, then San Benito), as—in New Orleans, for instance—the debauchery of Fat Tuesday precedes Ash Wednesday. Before plastic or rubber masks were available, callancanos used to dry the skins of the heads of animals, which they wore as masks at the celebration. So there was also an additional element of the savage confronting the human which unfortunately is now missing from the Festival. Nowadays it falls to the dozens of males swilling cases each of Pilsen, Cristal and Cusqueña and starting fistfights in the street to represent the savage.

Merry Christmas from Callanca

A Hall of Mirrors in a House of Cards

About two weeks ago, the engineer in charge of a water project in Rama Guzmán (a sector of Callanca), the treasurer of the water committee (the group of residents responsible for the project—president, treasurer, secretary) and I went to the office of the Alcaldesa, my buddy Rita, to ask the Municipalidad to help Rama Guzmán with a big problem that had arisen with the water project. The dumbfuck engineer had not measured the voltage at the site of the well and it turned out that because of the poor condition of the electrical lines in Rama Guzmán only 110 volts of the 220 volts necessary in these parts was arriving to the site of the well and the electric pump installed therein. Rita listened to our story but seemed altogether unsympathetic. She said that she would look into the possibility of having ElectroNorte, the electric company, correct the problem. Don’t call me, I’ll call you, in other words. At this meeting I happened to hear Rita say that tomorrow she’d be in a caserío called Pómape to participate in the celebration of their anniversary.

A few days earlier a couple of friends had invited me to Pómape, the same celebration. The night before the anniversary they called to remind me. We in fact went to Pómape, but just to hang out and see what the celebration of the anniversary of the caserío was like. When Rita showed up she invited me to join the dignitaries on the dias. She then invited me to lunch there at the celebration—they’d set up some temporary structures housing restaurants. The pepian de pato was first-rate, by the way. During lunch I decided what the fuck, and asked Rita if she’d thought any more about that electrical problem in Rama Guzmán. To my surprise, she said no problem, she could take care of it right away “con un documento.” That means, if you write an oficio soliciting my assistance and deliver it to my office on Monday or Friday, the days when I attend the public, I can help you.

I reported this the next day to the engineer, the president and secretary of the water committee, and the teniente gobernadora, a State official who’s supposed to look out for the interests of the sectors in which she lives. The secretary and the teniente seemed to take me seriously, the president and the engineer couldn’t have cared less. That’s when I began to sense where the lines were drawn in this battle.

The teniente wrote the oficio, I typed it up on my laptop and printed it in Chiclayo. I came back late from Chiclayo and really didn’t feel like doing anything else that day but in spite of that fact I rode my bike to Rama Guzmán and asked the teniente to sign it. It was fortunate that I did. While I was at the house of the teniente, the secretary of the water committee showed up. She said that the entire committee was meeting at that very moment in the house of the treasurer. A perfect chance to get everybody to sign at once so that we could deliver the document to Rita the following Monday.

I took the document to the treasurer’s house. There, the committee and the engineer were in the process of signing paperwork that would terminate the project, that is declare it to be successfully completed. This seemed odd to me in light of the fact that there was no electricity to run the pump but I figured what the hell, this is probably just a paperwork thing and they’re going to sign the papers but keep working on the electrical problem until it was fized. So I asked everybody to sign the oficio so that I could take it to Rita on Monday.

The treasurer looked it over and signed. The secretary, too. The president looked it over, shrugged, and handed it to the engineer—but without signing. The engineer looked it over and seemed concerned. The “asunto” of the oficio was this: “Se solicita apoyo para culminación del proyecto del pozo artesiano del Sector Rama Guzmán.” (“Seeking assistance for the completion of well project in Rama Guzmán.”) The engineer wasn’t on board with that wording. It indicated that the project was not complete and he and the president and treasurer were insisting that the project was indeed complete. Their responsibilities were at an end and it was up to somebody else to fix whatever problems remained.

The engineer and president refused to sign the document without a change to the “asunto.” They concocted a new one on the spot and scribbled it onto the document I’d spent two days getting written, typed and printed. They wanted it to read: “se solicita apoyo para funcionamiento del pozo artesiano del Sector Rama Guzmán.” (“Seeking assistance to allow the proper functioning of the well…”) They also redacted the body of the oficio where it referred to “culminación del proyecto.” While they finished their meeting I took the document to an internet cabinas nearby (I didn’t have my laptop with me) and the kid in charge laboriously typed the new document from scratch. It took about an hour due to interruptions, customers arriving and leaving. But because the kid obviously understood as he typed the document that I was helping out Rama Guzmán he only charged me for printing the document, a few céntimos to cover the cost of the ink.

It was getting dark and the meeting was breaking up when I got back to the treasuer’s house. But before they left everybody signed the document. The teniente, the secretary and I talked outside the treasurer’s house. That was when I found out that the engineer had failed to complete a great deal of work on the project. I wrote down everything they told me and later typed up and printed a list.

Basically, what the list said was this: besides the obvious and glaring problem of the absence of electricity, the engineer only had run pipe to the “caja” of each family included in the project (to the box similar to what we have in our yards in the U.S., a valve that allows you turn on and off the water supply for the entire house). They were supposed to install “caños” (a spigot or standpipe) and “tubería domiciliaria” (an indoor pipe to the kitchen or bathroom) in each house. The engineer was also supposed to have provided “capacitaciones” on how to care for the well and the pump and how to treat the drinking water with chlorine. Instead his assistant had collected signatures under false pretenses indicating that pobladores had attended these sessions and the engineer had charged the project for having supposedly taught the workshops. Furthermore, three thousand soles had disappeared from the bank account. (Later the treasurer admitted that he’d taken a “loan” from the account.) The engineer had installed a small provisional pump in the well that would run on 110 volts but had never even tested the larger pump, the pump that would run the system once an adecuate source of electricity was available. The provisional pump was running off a wire that the engineer had spliced into the electrical line of the resident nearest the well. There was no meter measuring how much energy the pump was burning. The unfortunate resident was going to receive an electric bill of 200 soles instead of 20 the following month. Materials left over from the project had disappeared without explanation. The engineer had all the seals (stamps that Peruvians affix alongside their signatures when they sign official documents) in a plastic bag in his briefcase and wouldn’t let the members of the water committee sign any document without his approval. And, finally, the engineer refused to turn over to the secretary or the teniente gobernadora the “expediente” (project plan) that would have allowed them to verify that all of the missing elements I’ve mentioned had in fact been promised in the project.

A bit of corruption perhaps? Let’s say that yes, there was a good possibility of that. The following Monday, the secretary of the water committee, the teniente gobernadora and I paid a visit to the mayor’s office in Monsefú, the District captial. We brought with us two letters, the original oficio that stated that the project was not completed, signed by me, the teniente and the secretary (“Secretaria del ORNE” handwritten under the signature since engineer had the secretary’s seal in a plastic bag in his briefcase) along with the redacted version of the letter signed and sealed by the entire committee plus the teniente and me. We also brought with us my typed list of the unmet provisions of the project.

I had no idea how the Alcaldesa would react to this. Corruption being rampant in Perú, for all I knew the Alcaldesa was in for her cut of embezzled funds from the project.

She looked over all the paperwork. Fortunately, I’d brought with me our original letter, all the redactions insisted upon by the engineer and the president of the water committee scribbled in the margins, all references to the incomplete status of the project crossed out or written over. This document seemed to impress the Alcaldesa. I had to keep reminding myself that the purpose of the letter was to petition for an adecuate supply of electricity to the well and pump. Justice in the form of some type of reprimand or denunciation of the crooks would’ve been gravy but that wasn’t really what we were there for. The Alcaldesa said that she’d speak personally to ElectroNorte and write a letter asking them to fix the electrical problem. She kept a copy of the list of complaints and also kept the redacted letter. We told her that a meeting had been scheduled for a week from today by the president and the engineer; they were going to close the project at that meeting. The Alcaldesa said not to worry, she’d call in the engineer for a little chat well before the meeting.

Verónica, the secretary of the water committee, is a woman I work with frequently on many projects. She’s honest, trustworthy and tireless in her efforts to improve conditions in a community that often doesn’t give much of a shit whether its conditions improve or not. There are many reasons for this, among them poor education and the fact that everybody has to work 24 hours a day in order to eat and can’t concentrate on much of anything else. At any rate, I check in with Verónica several times a week at her house in Rama Guzmán because she never has any saldo on her cellphone to call me when there’s a problem with some project. And there’s always a problem with some project. On the Thursday following our Monday morning meeting with the mayor, I rode my bike to Vero’s house in Rama Guzmán. She wasn’t home so I rode to her grandmother’s house and found her there sorting freshly picked basil with her relatives. “Ai, don Carlos,” she said, “se armó un gran lío.” There’s a big mess.

Verónica and her son, Andy.

The Regidor (city councilman) from Callanca, who’d also been present at the meeting with the Alcaldesa, had called the engineer and told him that we’d come to Rita’s office to spill the beans. So now we knew that the Regidor was probably in on the graft. After hearing about our denunciations, the president of the water committee had gone to Verónica’s house and when he didn’t find Vero at home had thrown a shit fit in the presence of her husband, accusing Vero of “andando con el gringo” (running around with the gringo, me) and accusing Vero’s husband Pablo of having a woman on the side and in short engaging in the strategy preferred by all crooks—the best defense is a good offense. If your own character is under assault, attack the character of your accusers. Furthermore, the engineer and the president and the treasurer had moved up the date of the meeting to close the project. It was now scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.

Coincidentally, I had another meeting with the Alcaldesa scheduled for the following morning. I was going to accompany the teniente gobernador of another sector, Rama Alicán, to the mayor’s office to ask for repairs to the road. The road entering Alicán was so bad that no motos wanted to carry passengers there. The teniente and I waited an hour or so and the Alcaldesa called us in. Engineers employed by the Municipalidad joined us and we agreed upon a plan to repair the road. I then took advantage of the opportunity to inform Rita about the meeting scheduled for that afternoon and again showed her the list of unmet provisions for the project. She asked why nobody had invited her to the meeting. “No quieren que venga,” I said. Because they don’t want you there. That was all Rita needed to hear. She said she’d see me at meeting.

The meeting was scheduled for three o’clock, I showed up at 3:45 and people were just starting to arrive. Verónica and Roxana, the teniente gobernadora, were there, also the engineer and his assistant, the president of the water committee and the treasurer, plus, by 4:15, about 50 residents of Rama Guzmán. They called the Regidor. He’d forgotten about the meeting. He was on his way, he said. At around 4:30 the meeting started. The Regidor had arrived by then. Rita, the Alcaldesa, never shows up until there’s a full house so I was expecting her in 15 minutes or a half-hour. Meanwhile, the president of the water committee did his tapdance. He said what a wonderful day was today, a glorious project now complete, all promises fulfilled, all beneficiaries content. It sounded like one of Fidel Castro’s May-Day speeches in La Plaza de la Revolución in Havanna. Maybe not quite that long. The president said how proud he was of having participated in the project although he’d received nothing in return and had paid without complaint his taxi fares and other out-of-pocket expenses without seeking reimbursements from the project budget. He told a touching story of how he’d once found 50 soles in the street. His companion had told him that such are the gifts that Heaven bestows upon deserving and selfless individuals.

I suppressed an urge to puke.

The Alcaldesa showed up during the treasurer’s speech. He was explaining the 3000 soles the project had loaned him and swearing that he had bank vouchers indicating the monthly payments he’d made to date. He shut up when the Alcaldesa arrived. Everyone exchanged greeting and then it was the engineer’s turn to explain the costs of the project. They’d prepared a couple of “papelotes”—throwaway paper posters—with all the major categories of credits and debits printed on them in Magic Marker. It came as no surprise to me that they’d spent almost all the money in the budget. Of 90,000 soles less than 2,000 remained. The engineer talked about how they’d gone above and beyond the call of duty in the project, digging to 12 meters instead of the projected 10 meters to find water, installing pipe of ¾” instead of ½” when required, borrowing a ½-horsepower pump from the Regidor to fill the tanks at the well site when they discovered that there wasn’t enough power to run a 1-horsepower pump. He insisted that people misunderstood the scope of the project and were expecting spigots and indoor plumbing when the project didn’t call for these measures.

The meeting.

The Alcaldesa asked a few questions during the presentation but waited to speak until the engineer had finished. She asked if the engineer thought that FONCODES, the firm sponsoring the project, would allow the community to keep the 1,900 soles remaining in the budget and the engineer thought yes, that they would. At that moment I thought we were done for. It didn’t seem as if the Alcaldesa was going to mention any of unmet provisions of the project included in the list we’d given her on Monday. She was going to ask for the 2,000 measly soles leftover from the project and that was it. I thought that surely the Alcaldesa must be in on swindle along with the Regidor, the engineer, the president and the treasurer.

“And if they’ll let the community keep that money,” said the Alcaldesa, “then surely they’ll provide…” and she pulled our list out of a folder on her lap. “…standpipes for all the beneficiaries?...plumbing to a designated area of each household?” And she read off each of our complaints in order and waited for the engineer to reply. He agreed to every one. What else could he do?

In Perú nobody ever really accuses anyone directly of misconduct, they’re very genteel. If the Watergate hearings had occurred in Perú, the interrogators of the White House staff would have said things like, “while I respect greatly the contributions of the Republican Party in furthering the ideals of democracy over the course of our nation’s history, I regret that some individuals in government may have overstepped the boundaries established by the rights and duties of their offices and the in the process of doing so harmed certain institutions of our government, what, sir, is your opinion on this matter?” What Rita had just done was as much of a slam-dunk-in-your-face insult as you’ll ever encounter in Perú. She thanked us—the teniente, the secretary and I—for having brought certain outstanding problems to her attention and made sure that the residents of Rama Guzmán left with the impression that she, the Alcaldesa, had secured all of these additional benefits for them of her own goodwill and voition and not because they were stated provisions of the project and it was her obligation to do so. In that respect politicians in Perú differ not at all from U.S. politicians.

The atmosphere as the meeting broke up was anything but tense or hostile. The engineer and his cohorts weren’t smiling but they weren’t pouting, either. I and the teniente and the secretary were smiling but we weren’t gloating. None of us was sure what would transpire in the weeks to come. In Perú it’s dangerous to claim victory too soon. In Perú it’s dangerous to claim victory ever. That, I think, is why everyone is so indirect in their comments about individuals or situations. We’re supposed to go to FONCODES this week and arrange the details of the culmination of the project. But nobody’s taking anything for granted, neither the apparent winners nor the apparent losers. We all know that everything can change at any time and based upon any whim of any official involved. Such is the hall of mirrors inside a house of cards that’s the political and institutional environment of Perú.

Giving Up is Only the First Step

A year ago when I arrived in Callanca I asked at the health post if there existed any record of the number of diabetics living in Callanca. I wanted to offer some classes on how to manage the disease. Needless to say no such records existed. In fact the health post didn’t even own a glucose monitor so there was no way to screen pregnant women for gestational diabetes or older, overweight patients for Type II diabetes. A related problem had been proven to exist without doubt. The health post was open only from 8 A.M. to 1 P.M. six days a week. It offered no laboratory facilities or services or testing equipment more sophisticated than a scales and blood-pressure sleeve. The post was tiny. It had been built in the 1980s to serve 2,000 people and was now attempting to serve 6,000. So Gisela, the obstetrician, convinced me to triage the diabetes education classes and help her in her efforts to expand the health post. Sure, why not?

Gisela assured me that preparations for the expansion were well underway. A year ago she’d met with an NGO in Chiclayo and the NGO had offered the services of an engineer who’d come to Callanca to survey the land on which the expansion would take place and to draw up plans. Gisela brought out a thick file folder. It contained papers that addressed the issue of a donation of land for the expansion of the health post. The donated land consisted of a small parcel in back of the existing health post. We looked out the back window at it, an even, rocky, barren strip of earth about the size of two tennis courts with carizo (cane-like weeds) five feet high growing in the strip nearest the building where it received enough shade to survive. It looked like a quarter-acre of Hiroshima from the year 1946. No wonder somebody donated this, I remember thinking, who would want it and of what use could it possibly be to anyone besides the posta?

But in Callanca that’s a dangerous question to ask about any piece of land. Here nobody gives away land. Not for a park, not for a market, not for a school, not even the four or five square meters it takes to accommodate a well that would provide water for maybe 60 or 80 families. And not for a health post, either, I was about to find out.

Gisela extracted papers from the file folder and told me that the land in back of the health post had in fact been donated by the legal owners, a family named Gonzales. A thick sheaf of papers that included photocopied identification cards, signatures and fingerprints indicated that the donation had been made four years ago. So why was the health post still the size of a Seven-Eleven store and keeping the hours of an antique shop in Monson, Maine? There’d been a dispute over ownership of the donated land, Gisela admitted. Even though the title to the land was registered to the Gonzales, another family had disputed the donation. They said that the property was actually theirs and that the Gonzales had stolen it from them twenty years ago when the Municipalidad had first sent representatives to Callanca to take a census and register property ownership.

Two years ago representatives of the families had signed an “acta,” a copy of which Gisela extracted from her folder. The acta stipulated that the families would be paid 2,000 soles each to stop bickering and agree to the donation. The Gonzales were willing to donate outright but since the other family—a family that didn’t even officially own the land—was demanding money, they wanted money, too. The posta had never paid the 4,000 soles. So even though the land had been “donated” both by the family that owned it and by the family that didn’t own it, the health post was unable to do anything with the land because of “those people,” Gisela said, and nodded in a direction that indicated I was supposed to know of whom she was speaking. Who are “those people” I finally had to ask.

“Los Campos,” she whispered, and nodded in the same direction. Los Campos? But the Campos were my host family, the family in Callanca with which I was living. Their house was located next-door to the health post. My host family was singlehandedly preventing the expansion of the health post..

Slowly but surely, over the course of nearly a year, this revelation would give rise to a series of discoveries and related events that could only have taken place in Perú. First, Gisela returned to the NGO that had been willing to sponsor the renovation two years ago. Needless to say they’d long ago spent those funds on other projects and couldn’t promise more funding in the forseeable future. Next, Gisela consulted the legal advisor for the Ministry of Health in Chiclayo. The lawyer looked over the paperwork and said that the donation was still valid, however no organization either public or private was going to fund the renovation unless we settled the dispute between the legal owners of the property and the supposed owners—my host family. Gisela didn’t want any part of this negotiation. It was up to me.

I’ve finally been able to work out a mutually satisfactory, even cordial relationship with my host family. But during the period of which we’re speaking conditions were much less than cordial and far from satisfactory. When I broached the subject with César and Margot they insisted that the land belonged to the heirs of César’s late aunt, Micalea Campos, and that the family in whose name the title was registered had stolen the land and sereptitiously registered the title without the Campos’ consent or knowledge. When I pointed out that an agreement to donate the land would benefit the entire community Margot asked what the community had ever done for them and what benefits could they expect? She unleashed a screed on the subject of their financial problems, how badly they needed money to pay off their loans, how César’s mother Natividad was ill and bedridden and who in the community was thinking about her or her welfare? I knew that César’s mother and father were actually very well off and regularly hosted weddings and birthday parties at their house that had to be costing them hundreds or thousands of soles. But of course I kept quiet about this and let Margot keep talking. The people who do the most talking in a disgreement eventually end up saying something that compromises their own position. This Margot did. She said that the only reason the Campos were demanding money was because the other family, the Gonzales, were demanding money as well and if the wrongful owners were going to benefit from the transfer of the land then so were the rightful owners. I pounced on this opportunity. I knew that the Gonzales weren’t asking for a penny. The only reason they’d ever been offered money was because the Campos had demanded money and they and the NGO who’d tried to resolve the dispute two years before had thought it fair to offer money to both parties. So if the Gonzales were willing to donate outright then so were the Campos?, I asked. Either because she thought the Gonzales would be unwilling to donate or because she’d painted herself into a corner, Margot somewhat hesitantly agreed and César concurred. I settled for this shaky commitment, returned to speak with the Gonzales and confirmed their willingness to donate and, over the course of the next few weeks and months, spoke to my family about the donation as if it were a done deal. Gradually they seemed to resign themselves to the idea. Possibly they realized how bad they would look in the community if they and they alone were holding up the expansion of the health post.

During those months several events beyond our control occurred. Elections were held and the change of leadearship meant that many functionaries at all levels of government changed, including the legal advisor at the Ministry of Health. The previous advisor had been extremely helpful and interested in our situation and his specialty had been property rights. The new advisor didn’t seem particularly concerned about us and her specialty was contract law. So we found ourselves severely deficient in that critical area of support. Also Sebastiana Gonzales, the Gonzales in whose name the donated property was registered, died suddenly. According to some of the legal experts whose advice we sought, this meant that a description of the property and a notification of its change in ownership had to be published in the newspaper so that any heirs to the property other than the sons of Sebastiana could come forward and state a claim. This would not only delay the donation but would result in costs that the health post couldn’t afford and that the heirs to the property would be unlikely to want to incur. Also the doctor in charge of the health post quit and a new doctor was assigned to replace her. The departing doctor took with her the health post’s only copy of the plans drawn up by the NGO four years previously.

But problems beyond our control appeared to be the least of our worries. Plenty of problems that had been completely under the control of the health post also existed. They easily could have followed through with the stipulations of the acta consenting to the donation two years ago when the NGO had been willing to pay both parties. They could have taken advantage of the recent willingness of the Campos to agree to the donation and could have signed a new acta while Sebastiana was still alive. They could’ve made more than one copy of the plans. But they didn’t and so we began to explore other options.

In the course of exploring these options we found out that there was one other small detail that the health post had never gotten around to attending to. It turned out that the title to the land on which the existing health post had been built had never been publicly registered following its donation twenty years ago. In short, nobody legally owned any of the land that the current much less the future health post occupied or might eventually occupy. The health post was essentially a publicly funded squatter.

We sorted all this out with an attorney. The cost of registering all the land and wiping up all the legal nastiness involved in establishing legitimate ownership would come to 2000 soles, the land on which the current posta had been built could be registered immediately but the land slated for the expansion would take more time. The cost of surveying the land and drawing up a plan would come to 4000 soles. We would need to construct a fence around the property to be donated and hang up a sign declaring the land to be the property of the health post and the site of the future construction of an addition. This would cost several hundred more soles. It all seemed pretty much impossible so nobody did anything for several months.

But in Perú (if not everywhere), giving up is only the first step.

The new doctor—though of course it took her some weeks to get accustomed to her new job—turned out to be willing to devote the time and attention it deserved to the process of clearing the title to all the property. And an unexpected ally, someone who’d been working on the expansion of the health post long before I arrived in Callanca, came to our aid.

Aldo Rodríguez was a callancano I’d worked with on various other projects—the artisans’ association, agricultural projects and the establishment of a municipalidad in Callanca. He knew about the legal stipulations requiring us to fence in the land and post an official notice. Some months previously he’d been about to begin that work when I told him about the disputed ownership of the property on which the expansion would take place. He lost interest at that point but now he’d returned to speak with the doctor and understood better all the implications of the legal procedures pending. He had a friend, an engineer, who’d be willing to survey the land and draw up a plan for free. The engineer was used to working with the public registry of deeds and titles and volunteered to do the investigation necessary at no cost. He believed that he could clear the titles without the help of the expensive attorney.

So with these processes underway, it was again up to me to drag my host family along for the ride. Aldo scheduled a meeting at the posta to sign the acta that would make official the donation of the land for the expansion. All I had to do was get my host family to show up and sign.

Everything in Perú requires a document. Aldo delayed in writing and printing the document inviting all the interested parties and witnesses to the meeting until the day before the meeting would take place. Late in the afternoon on the day before the meeting he brought me invitations for César and Margot and for Macedonio, César’s father. I left a copy with César and Margot and at dusk rode my bike to Macedonio’s house out in the fields north of Callanca.

Macedonio greeted me warmly. Macedonio always greets me warmly in spite of the fact that he probably has about as much use for a gringo as he does for a subscription to GQ. He respects me because he knows why I’ve come to Callanca and sees that I haven’t shown up for a week or a month and then headed back to Lima or Chiclayo as have so many other so-called friends of Callanca over the years. Though an octogenerian and a little hard of hearing, Macedonio can still dance till dawn at a matrimonio and consume liters of beer and chicha as he does so. His wife Natividad is confined to a wheelchair after surviving stomach cancer and the requisite treatments. Both she and Macedonio were still plenty sharp enough, I’m sure, to guess the reason for my visit. I explained that the posta was finally ready to begin preparations for the expansion and showed Macedonio the invitation. He thought it was a paper that I wanted him to sign but I repeated that it was merely an invitation. He handed it to his daughter María who read it, confirmed its nature and pointed out to Macedonio that the signing would take place tomorrow. María clearly wasn’t happy with this development. Her late mother was Micaela, the alleged owner of the disputed property. Later I understood that there was another reason why María seemed unhappy. For some reason Aldo, when he’d written the invitation, had included a paragraph thanking the Gonzales family for donating the land but making no mention whatsover of the Campos. Since I hadn’t had time to read the invitation before delivering it I didn’t find this out until later that night.

In spite of the lateness of the invitation and the undiplomatic wording of the document, the Campos, represented by César and Macedonio, showed up on time for the meeting the next day. On time meaning on Peruvian time, an hour or so late. Aldo was there, and of course the doctor and Gisela, as well as three witnesses and the Teniente Gobernador, an appointed official of the Peruvian government living and working in Callanca. The only person who hadn’t shown up was Benjamín, the representative of the Gonzales family. Aldo had invited him and he’d said that he’d be there. Aldo rode his bike to Benjamín’s house and returned. He wasn’t at home. He was in Chiclayo. We couldn’t call him because his cellphone was “malogrado”—yestereday he’d dropped it in an irrigation ditch.

The Campos suggested that while we waited we should go out back and indicate the boundaries of the donated property as defined by the plans the engineer had drawn up. This we did and the Campos seemed satisfied with the limits of the property. When we returned to the posta Aldo went again to look for Benjamín and came back accompanied by the Gonzales’ representative. Benjamín had arrived while we were out back defining the property lines and had thought that nobody had shown up for the meeting.

It was time to compose and sign the acta. In Perú “palabras” are necessary at a time like this. Everyone in the room who has taken part in the process says a few words to mark the occasion, restate the history of the action to be described in the acta, and thank the parties in attendance. The doctor, Aldo, Benjamín, César and I spoke while Gisela wrote the acta, which briefly stated the minutes of the day’s activities and alluded to the agreement between the Campos and the Gonzales. We passed around the libro de actas, a book of the official minutes of all past meetings organized by the posta, and each person signed the acta. All seemed relieved and in good spirits. So much so that César suggested that we immediately return to the donated land and stake off the property lines. Aldo, God bless him, had brought in his book bag not only the tape measure we’d used to measure the property but also the stakes and twine we’d need to stake off the boundaries.

It took about an hour to remeasure dimensions and drive the stakes. I shot some photos to commemorate the occasion. By then it was getting dark. We shook hands or kissed cheeks and said good-bye.

And that’s as unequivocally successful a termination to a project as one could ever hope to achieve in Perú, where equivocation is the very definition of the path to success and where giving up is but the first step in finding that path.