Break it up

Wednesday, July 22

The swine flu has created quite a scare in Peru. 14 have died according to La Voz de Ica. Apparently a foreigner in Cusco is responsible for this spread. Of course, if anyone was to make up a story about how it got here that would be the story that would be made up by probably 79% of any Peruvian. i.e. Cusco has many foreigners.

This relates to our project because this has led to the closure of all schools nationally for 2 weeks. 2 weeks. 2 f-ing weeks in an attempt to stem any further spread at a delicate time in Peru´s development. Unfortunately, we need those kids to be in school if we are going to talk to them about starting our project with them. I suppose that will have to wait and instead we will have to meet with other stakeholders in the project.

Our first such meeting is with Ascensión of the Int. Fed. of the Red Cross. She is the one who´s worked with many different NGOs in many different fields and many different countries not to mention continents. She is especially valuable as she has found a way to play a very influential role as project manager of the reconstruction efforts of her NGO but remains well connected and down to earth by working closely with her team as well as the international management of the Red Cross. Do the readers of this blog understand that the Red Cross has many different branches that are not under the same structure, the federation is one of them and then you have chapters of the Red Cross in many countries? There is not always pure cooperation between all these chapters, though there is much work streamlined due to having the same last name.

She is helpful. She says our project is useful and will help us out, tho she is leaving for Australian vacation spots for two weeks. See, she has learned that the next few weeks (due to independence day) everyone will be on vacation and the prices for travel will skyrocket within the country. She mentions a Florian Krueger in Lima who is working on starting a website charting all the NGOs working and granting them the option to upload their info for sharing to other NGOs working in the same area and/or on the same type of project. Maybe we can help/share ideas with him. Oh, but he is leaving for Germany vacation spots today. Great. We call him anyways, and he agrees to stay in contact via email and will help us out over vacation if he can.

She also recommends talking to Reagan Roy, a Canadian NGO worker living in Ica with 23 years of experience working in the region. So, he knows his stuff, especially that which pertains to the differences in the various communities of the Ica region. We call him and successfully set up a meeting tomorrow at 4pm. So much for Ica no more ever again.

From here we head over to try and find Arsídias or Jorge B since we weren´t able to get ahold of them yesterday. We want to confirm our Saturday meeting with them since we are considering asking them to partner with us in teaching these chicos in San Clemente. Of course, they are not there. The gate guard, Michael, blames a power outage. This is where Brooke becomes friends with him and learns he lives right behind our Pollotel. We agree to meet him later tonight to help us find a place to rent for a month at a cheaper rate.

Always staying in touch with Segundo from CEAS in San Clemente, we head over to the new bamboo Catholic Church to show him what we have come up with for our proposal and here is feedback. He agrees to help us set up a meeting with some community leaders but this will not be able to take place until August 5th. That is literally 2 weeks from now. He patiently explains that next week basically no one is working since three days are officially holiday. Everywhere people are planning on simply taking the week off in its entirety. He is really busy planning a conference for tomorrow on different types of earthquake-resistant housing construction techniques, so he can´t talk too long.

After picking up a late lunch at the market of chicharrón (flavorfully roasted pork with corn and lettuce), bananas, and 24 breads of different varieties, we head back to the taxi company that we used when we lost our food knife and sunglasses. None of the mentioned are that valuable, except in fondness and usefulness value – in which the knife is top-ranked in both. Adam claims it may be the only thing he has left from his childhood in Nigeria – and at a whopping total of $3 (some 12 years ago) it has been through a lot.

Amazingly we are able to track down our driver and he has the objects stored in his house for safety. He had considered driving around with it yesterday, but figured a customer who happens to open the glove compartment might freak out if he finds a knife! We thank the man for his honesty and give him a token papa rellena (stuffed potato).

From there its time to head back to the pollotel and critique any new ideas we have for the project. We spend some time thinking more about the many different options we have for spending the rest of our time here. We calendar out everything from quitting, to jungle documentary, and even to extending our stay. Of course we come to no hard conclusions since we still lack information. In the meantime we get a call from Martin who wants us to help him finish encuestas for Proética on Saturday. In addition, Jaime Mok calls to let us know that he is available for meeting us tomorrow morning, which is huge since he has been thinking of how the NGO reconstruction intervention can become more participative by analyzing the way it is done now in detail. This work is just beginning for a thesis project he is developing. Maybe we can work together.nn

Tuesday, July 21

The best part of waking up is quaker in your cup. Why didn’t we think of this before we got to Perú? It´s basically milk and oatmeal but in drinkable form with cinnamon and clave and some other spice.

10 am meeting at CODEHICA over the planning of the August 15 festivities to commemorate the 2 year anniversary of the earthquake. To the meeting are invited a smattering of NGOs interested in working together and taking advantage of CODEHICA´s superior communications department to advertise via radio, tv, and posters the event that is meant to be a chance for leaders of communities in Ica, Pisco, and Chincha to voice their concerns over the lack of reconstruction by the government. The theme is “Una sola voz por la reconstrucción”. One voice for the reconstruction.

We now understand why NGOs around here are not really excited about having these meetings. It is one of the slowest we have yet to see, with little progress made over the span of 2 hours. We arrive 3 minutes late. To put this into perspective, we arrive not only third out of everyone, but before three out of four representatives from the very office it is held in even arrive. Clearly, the NGO communities are not the only one who are late all the time. We start 30 mins late after they give up waiting for the other NGOs who seem to have prioritized other activities at the last minute.

The objective of the meeting is to delegate responsibilities – both financial, as well as for the detail planning for the activity. They successfully choose three different people to be in charge of the details and discuss over and over the different financial costs and how to tweak it, but never who will actually cover it. Both of these things seem to be things that will end up being done in the end.

Unfortunately, few of the reps are the reps we have gotten to know at their respective NGOs. This makes us sad, since we had planned to speak to them in person about our project proposal. Instead we have to settle with simply speaking with Charo and Martin, Pepe and the 3 CODEHICA interns. They promise to get back to us.

We are leaving for San Clemente now. It is there that we are leaning towards working due to its high density of NGOs, proximity to PNUD Pisco, familiarity with community leaders, presence of four schools and 1 Instituto Superior (tech school), agricultural demographic but easy access to either more rural to the east and the urban Pisco slightly more south.

First, we have to move out of our rented room. This means we will have to leave our bikes with the Arquitectos de la Emergencia, a friendly French NGO with young leadership and a rented place in Ica, as well as some excess baggage. And then we are off from Ica for good. So ends our 2-week stint at Ica, our third stint after Tambo de Mora and Pisco. So must begin our 4-week stint in San Clemente.

But we have a 4 pm meeting in Pisco with the journaling girls of the Colegio Bandera in Pisco. Granted we arrive a little late due to a fiasco of leaving our food knife and sunglasses in the colectivo (we are on a bad streak of losing things), we are stood up. Arsidias, the guy in charge, does not answer his cell phone. The school is all locked up and everyone informs us that there is no classes. Really? Thanks.

Arsidias is not in his office, we are carrying around full bags of most everything we own, and again we are bikeless – a recipe for delicious crankiness to die for. Brooke decides to force herself to smile and chuckle to make herself feel better. Adam grabs the closest electrical pole, wrenches it outta the ground, snaps it in eight places, puts one end of the snapped wire into an ear and the other plunged into his heart. Lindsey buys 36 breads, 24 of which are sweetened, and a lasso for catching small children of the pig variety.

All satisfied in different ways, we regroup happily to head to San Clemente. As you must do when it is late and you have no bikes and heavy packs, we set up shop in the cheapest place we can find. Happens to be a room above a fried chicken joint. Our window opens to the chimney as the chicken cooks. The cooks also seem to thoroughly enjoy watching TV very loudly while they fry. At 15 soles per night we are doling out cash for lodging at three times our last place. In a couple days, if we decide to stay, we will find the cheaper option. For now, we will just chill out and pay the hefty price of $5 for 3 people.

Dinner is chicken soup with the entrée being chanfainita and tallerines. We get a lot of food and can´t even finish one meal between two people. How do people do it around here? The two people next table over looked like they were on a date and the girl was 80% brooke´s size. And she ate an entire meal herself. We finally ended up packing some of the soup up for the next day and rolling up the hill to our pollotel.


Monday, July 20

We wake up in Chincha at 6am. 6:30am and we are at the bus stop. Water is bought. 7:30am and we are at the Cruce just east of Pisco. By 8:15am we make it to PNUD´s office in San Andes where-

“Expletive, where is the still camera?”

Musta left it on the bus. We go back and do everything we can to track it down but its no where to be found and the bus was thoroughly examined to no avail. Here marks our first significant loss of the trip. Good thing we have insurance on all our electronics. And we can still take stills with our video camera so we are OK. Bad news is that the camera had a 16 GB SD card with other information not to mention a couple days of pictures taken by one very photographically talented boy.

In San Andrés, Henry hooks us up with an escort to find two people from the municipality of Pisco that might be useful to help us out: Jorge Bardales who is in charge of capacitación charlas with the community, and Jorge Pineda, the municipal press representative. Jorge B hooks us up with Arsídias who is doing a video and civic participation program with a group of rich girls at a private school in Pisco. Jorge B seems great but Arsídias is a bit less interested in what we have to say.

Jorge P is in a suit. He is also very busy. But he says, estamos en contacto and is willing to air whatever we want. At first he thinks we are coming on the part of PNUD with a documentary that we want him to air. We patiently explain to him that our documentary is currently in the form of a 300 GB amoeba. It will not be released from its cacoon as a beautiful butterfly until April or May of 2010.

Sounds easy, but tracking down these two guys took a good chunk of the day as they were in and out and in out. After this we spent some time checking out the organization of Pisco´s temporary municipal set-up. Since the earthquake cleaned out its plaza de armas location, they have been forced to separate into different camps of single-story wooden módulos for shelter to set up operations. This seems to indicate that the muni might actually not have any money like it says, since it has yet to even rebuild its own office.
We spend the rest of the day doing some hard-core brainstorming together over what we will be doing over the rest of our time here. This is the part where we come up with an idea for what a couple engineering students with below-average communications abilities, no experience working for reconstruction NGOs, 10 flipcams, 2.5 weeks, limited contacts in any given community, and little familiarity with not only Peru but life in general can do to help.

We cover some pages of paper with lists of strengths and weaknesses for different project ideas we come up with. After significant effort, hairs pulled out, and brains jostled, we decide to buy a couple bananas and 4 scoops of ice cream to share a banana split. Suddenly, we have typed up a one page proposal for what our project might look like and type up another page of critique questions that we would like responded to by the people we have met that have best understood why we are here at all. These include: Daniel from ASPEm, Eduardo from LWR, Henry (and his entire office) from PNUD Pisco, Rosario and Hernán from PNUD Ica, Ascensión from the Federación Int. de Red Cross, Jaime Mok from Paz y Esperanza, Charo and Pepe from CODEHICA, Martin from the Colectivo de Periodistas, Leonardo from Proética, 3 university interns at CODEHICA, and some others. These are some of the first-team all star NGO workers that we have gotten to know as defined by how well they understood what we are doing.

We spend some cash printing off copies to hand out as well as sending out emails to all that we can.

After that we head over to check out a group of evangelists in the plaza who have rented really loud speakers, are dressed in suits and are on a stage healing people. We join the semi-circle surrounding them as we much two chicken hamburgers and two carne hamburgers – the total of which cost us $1.33 at our favorite chicken couple.

We share some deep discussion on religion, and supernatural healing, as one person in the crowd claims that he has been healed of a tumor, another gained mobility in a strained shoulder, another a head pain of 15 days, and some others felt that they might have been healed as well but had to check their doctor. One boy was brought up who had a heart murmur and the healer in the suit tried praying multiple times for him and the boy kept saying he felt no different. Logically, the suited one thanked the boy and told him to go to his doctor to find out that the murmur was indeed better and that he should tell others about Christ when he was healed.

If supernatural powers are real, should they still be ignored and discredited?

After this we head to catch a bus to Ica since we have a meeting at 10 am. This is the first time in awhile that we have not had bikes with us at all and it is costly, frustrating, and tiring – all great character-building exercises according to Lindsey.