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.