Sunday, 26 July
We have decided to do our pilot post-disaster reconstruction participatory video as a means of NGO feedback in a semi-rural community outside of the city of Ica. The community we have chosen is in fact a group of three very small communities all clustered together. The total population we will be working with is approximately 250 families. This place is quite organized and already has a community center for us to work in. We have sealed our fate by letting a community leader know and will be moving in tomorrow.
There still exists the possibility of working there and in San Clemente, especially since María got back to us and has a place for us to stay for real cheap if we want to try and move back and forth.
Later we can post a complete list of the communities we were choosing from and a simple guide we used to decide.
Saturday, 25 July
For Peruvians, Saturday is also a rest day. But not everybody rests. The market for instance actually shows up in full force. As did the misty clouds this morning in Ica as well as San Clemente. Javier Uriano, a consultant for Proética a transparency NGO, also chose to organize another large survey over a large portion of the city of San Clemente. His goals are to see what the advance in reconstruction in the area has been in terms of homes specifically. This is a continued effort from the week before, with the iignificant additional twist that today we must also try and do all the homes whose inhabitants were not to be found as well as the places that were simply unlocateable due to lack of street signs, numbers, and local understanding of the municipalities arbitrary nomenclature for the shantytowns set up for immediate (but slowly more permanent) relief.
Anways, moral of the story is we helped them out again and it was another day long affair. It is useful to get a better feel for the layout of the land, however. We also had the opportunity to visit a couple of outlying clusters of towns, where the chickens for the pollerías probably don´t but conceivably could come from.
For the mission, there are two leaders – one from Proética and the other from a group of journalists in Ica named Martín Flores – one other college student besides myself, 7 members of the local Comité de Defensa Civil (Civil Defense Committee – they defend rights not tanks) and 2 volunteers from the community itself. Its a good group and at the end we exchange bitter stories of angry dogs, neighbors who give bad directions, lack of inhabitance in homes far away, and the general dispersal of the surveys. We were strictly ordered to meet back for lunch and wrap things up by 2:30pm, but I was impressed by my compadres drive to finish their lists of names, some of them staying out past 3:15pm.
Lunch was a massive chowdown on chinese food, see heavy pixel concentration to the right, which they affectionately have termed ´Chifa´ here.
From there I have a long-scheduled meeting to see 30 highschool girls do a video program on civil society issues. It is held in a bare, local TV filming station and the program is quite low-quality. The girls attempt to illicit calls from children who work but it seemed no one was watching, so they simply kept opting for commercial breaks. Gotta admire the girls for trying. We spoke to the 5 girls that actually showed up about their interest level in helping teach rural kids some of their camera skills. They giggled and laughed and whispered and nodded and said yeah it sounded interesting with faces that said “What movie should we see tonite? OMG, my boy just texted me!” We´ll plan for without them at the time being.
From there we head to the cheap internet place to catch up on e-mail and even facebook for the first time in about 2 months. How many is so many ignored invites? More than very many, anyways? We can´t update the blog today because its saved on another disk so are avid readers will have to suffer at least another 15 hours. Then we find a place in San Clemente since it is much cheaper to stay than Pisco. Tomorrow we plan to set things in motion for staying in Nueva Esperanza. Wish us luck.
Friday, 24 July
On the ground during a social science project, how does one make the in-between decisions best? The overarching conceptural decisions usually develop naturally. The minute details take care of themselves, and usually end up working out fine if you put the effort and time into doing them right. But its those in-between, and equally important decisions that really make you go back and forth like a poorly designed website.
For instance, the overarching goals of what we would do over the last few weeks of our project developed on its own mostly. And the minute details will work themselves out. But right now we need to make the in-between decisions, the intermediate decisions. We have to decide which community(ies) we will work in. We have to decide where to live during this time. We have to decide what order to set up our meetings for.
We have to make some of those by Monday – latest. We should've made those decisions by last Monday, but we spent a week plus trying to research the required information to make the best decision – especially which community to choose since this is huge, grandote, killer-difference-maker, chick-chick-BANG.
Since we have no community chosen for sure, we are unable to find a place to rent for long term. This means we have to pay three times as much for each night. So we decide to pull the plug and just choose San Clemente to work in. We've found a place for cheap in the community we will be working closest with. We show up with all our stuff this morning and to our dismay the owner pulls a fast one on us and informs us that since we have a computer with us we will be responsible for paying the difference between her regular electricity bill and the one that comes out during our stay. She thinks this will add 35 soles to the monthly price – an increase of over 40% in total price. In the end this price is not that high, but we don't like having fast ones pulled on us so we ask to leave our stuff there as we look around for a new place.
We head randomly asking around some more until we arrive at a neighboring community called Agua Santa. Apparently there a good smattering of NGOs working there as well, or so Adam thinks. We find a great place, with a single room on the roof. It sits overlooking a grassy park and even a bit of the outlying farms. The main road is close-by, and there is even a nice interior road that runs right the front – think like a bike. The family is a bunch of professors, real nice people, and are ok with us using their kitchen sometimes. Electricity (at no extra cost), clothes washing buckets and a clothesline. Price is $/. 100 soles which is pretty decent considering they are cleaning up the place for us and even putting in an outlet.
We look at each other a bit and say ok, we'll take it. We pay them up front. We head back to get our bags from the other place and drop them off. From there we head off to conquer the world. As we walk we realize that our place is situated in a community that is not exactly the most NGO-intervened community in San Clemente. In fact it is a good 10 minute walk away from the more NGO-intervened community of Santa Rosa. In addition, we suddenly remember the rural community of Nueva Esperanza outside of Ica. This community had struck us as well-organized, with a well-used multi-purpose community center. Two NGOs had done housing projects in the area already, and another was currently underway. Each project was differently done in many different ways. More than that, the area has a very secluded feel, a more rural, more communal and open feel. Maybe our time constraint means we should focus more on a community like this?
But we just paid 100 soles to stay here a month. We pow-wow and agree that its best to humbly apologize and grovel for our money back. We end up offering them 10 soles to leave our bags behind for the day and night, but gratefully take the 100 soles back off their hands. Whew.
From there we decide to come up with a more rigorous metric for choosing our community. But first lunch.
After aji de gallina and arroz and chicken soup and fried chicken and white beans we head over to the community of Santa Rosa to get to know them better. How aware are they of the NGOs working in their region? How friendly and curious do they feel? Can we find any local community centers, any youth running around with interest in a video camera project? The first few tries really arent very promising. Especially after we asked a person working on a house for an NGO and he told us that he knew of no NGOs that were working in this community itself but that some were elsewhere. We thought for sure he must be misunderstanding us, but after a good minute of clarification he had us convinced. He was unaware. Then we asked another two random community members out for a walk who racked their brains for a bit and then told us to ask someone else, but that yes there was a good bit of construction going around in the community. Wow. Thanks, sistas.
With time we found a multi-purpose room that might be employable but the owner is not around to find out for sure. In addition, we head over to a Red Cross/Emergency Architects meeting with the beneficiaries and they seem to be quite interested in the project. They convince us that such a project would work great in their community and are in fact quite organized with some youth who would be interested for sure. Exchanging of a few phone numbers and we have some promises to follow through if we just give them a call. Great.
We have decided to pay an emergency visit to Nueva Esperanza. We make another rash decision and jump on a bus for Ica. Then we call Ingrid, from APORTES, the only NGO that is currently working in Nueva Esperanza. Turns out they are actualy headed over later tonight, right about the time we are planning on arriving. Sometimes rash decisions pay dividends – by pure luck. The trick seems to be make rash decisions and make the best outta whatever shade of luck surfaces.
After the hour bus ride, and a 8 minute taxi ride we arrive with 30 mins to spare at the APORTES office. It is here that we sit down and make our little project selection matrix of criteria and possible communities. We have about 8 communities we are comparing. We come up with 11 different criteria that are most important to us. We weight the criteria so that the sum adds to 1. Then we come up with a 1 to 5 ranking system for each criteria and hang an appropriate number to each matrix square. This system is unfortunately very wishy washy but the decision process for such things is this way. Oh and MIT teaches you how to do this and we spent weeks on it – on such a simple obvious thing...
On the way to Nueva Esperanza, we learn that the community we were thinking of is actually a conglomerate of three: Nueva Esperanza, Señor de Lurén, and Mancocapa. They are more like streets, and less like blocks, and can be covered by walking in 10 mins. Upon arrival we see a flock of youth playing volleyball in the middle of the dirt road. Smaller children were to the side playing in the dried river. We end up breaking up a Women´s Meeting going on in the community center. They immediately take to the idea of a video camera project for the area. Three of the participants are above 16 years but less than 20, and agree they´d be interested in working with us for sure. They admit that they don´t have great luxuries to offer us if we wish to stay. That is a good thing, we say. We´d prefer to hang out how they hang out. Eat how they eat. At this they lighten up even more and start chatting about who can host us and how they can set up a rotation for cooking our meals. We mention we´d like to cook alongside them to learn from them, and there eyes brighten even more still.
After 20 minutes of introductions and talk of life, a group of men join us – the testosteroneated half of the town´s directive committee. Turns out the President is headed off to Arequipa for the holidays (Independence Day is next week!) and he has called an emergency meeting to pass off official power to the vice-president for the time being. From here, the women who do not double as committee members escort me around the town, stopping as the pass each others house to say goodbye´s. There was Paola, a great-grandma at least, Julia with stretched, acknowledgin eyes, Adrianna who insisted we talk till I was convinced their community was the one, and Pamela and Alison who are teenagers and best friends. At the oldest lady´s house they pull out a flask of wine from her stash. She cracks a wrinkled, toothless smile, then takes a swig before offering it around.
After dropping off Julia, Adrianna pulls out a clear bottle from her pocket and grins. “Ready to change colors?” Meet Pisco, the local liquor. Warm like tequila – also made similar just switch agave for grapes.
Adrianna leaves us, and from there the teenagers pull out a volleyball and start knocking it around. It is here that I realize what is going on. This was the rural Peruvian version of heavy recruiting.
The meeting over, and we are headed back to Ica where we will spend the night. We now have two very promising communities to choose from. Can we do both somehow? We tell them we will get back to them on Monday. In the meantime we will do some serious soul-searching, that is if we have souls. Otherwise we would be wasting our time right?
Do you think humans have souls? If so, what purpose do they serve? If not, where does meaning live?
Thursday, July 23
Today there is a day long conference sponsored by the Peruvian Ministry of Housing on the topic of seismic-resistant housing. Adam says it looks really interesting since they are bringing in engineers with specialties in adobe and quincha, which we know nothing about in the US. Brooke says we should go search for a place to rent long-term (a month).
Needless to say, we begin our home search by walking around randomly, but winding our way towards Santa Rosa, where Brooke remembers meeting María´s sister. The sister kindly escorts us down the hill a bit farther to María´s humble wooden shack on the very edge of town. María is an active member of San Clemente who feels very strongly that she has been discriminated against by Cruz Roja in the housing beneficiary selection process. She decided to do something about it and has worked with others who apparently share her sentiments to draft an official complaint complete with signatures and multiple trips to Cruz Roja hq in Lima.
Last time we met María, she had offered to help us find a place to live if ever we were to stay in San Clemente, and she does not fail to follow through. She first offers to rearrange her temporary wooden shell of a home to accomadate us but we kindly refuse for every reason that one could think of. After some discussion she determines that the best place for us is with her family members who live nearby and will take us there tomorrow at 4pm. Good for us, since we will
From there we head to Pisco where we have a 11am meeting with Jaime Mok from Paz y Esperanza. He is a great guy, and we are interested in seeing what his masters thesis is about and also hear feedback on our upcoming project. The meeting goes great and he encourages us to spend significant time thinking about where we do the project and how to narrow it so that we don´t overload ourselves. He knows from experience how long it often takes to get projects rolling if you want to do it in a participative process. By the way, Jaime is doing a long-distance masters through a University here colloquily called La Católica. His thesis is on the participative housing process carried out by a tripod housing and development effort by Cruz Roja, Paz y Esperanza, and Acción Contra el Hambre.
After Jaime is done splashing us with his wisdom, we attempt, once again, to meet up with Arsídias to confirm the details for the Saturday meeting with the youth TV reporters. He is not there but is expected to come later. Greeting our more reliable friend, Michael the gate guard, we find out that the swine flu is causing such a scare throughout Perú and they are considering lengthing the two-week cancellation of classes to three weeks to prevent the spread. People are especially worried about increased infections in places with high rates of malnutrition, like Puno. If you don´t know anything about Puno, please check it out online. It is the coldest place in Perú and children are dying bying the hundreds from lack of warmth and food. Since we have been here, many different organizations have been running food and clothing drives for the children of Puno. We really hope to visit before we leave to know for ourselves.
Giving up on Arsídias, we decide lunch and seismic-resistant housing is a better use of our time. Carapulcra con sopa seca from the market topped off with some sweet breads fresh out of a street bread oven. At the conference we greet the various NGO workers we recognize including Henry, Segundo, and the bamboo architects from CEAS. We walk in on time for the Adobe lecture, which turns out to be decently interesting. It is amazing how much work and study has gone into adobe around the world since it is the only feasible alternative for a large percentage of the world´s population. The take aways from this lecture were basically that:
Adobe will be used so we must try and make it as safe as possible
Adobe weak points are the corners, and wall sections that are not properly tied into the roof or second floor diaphragm.
There are 5 story houses built of adobe that are seismic resistant and lasted the earthquake with cracks comparable to concrete buildings of its size
To make adobe that strong it requires serious time and very massive walls.
Adobe is best if limited to a first floor with second floor walls of lighter material such as quincha
Undoubtedly, the other lectures were also quite interesting and we wish we could stay longer but we already have our 4pm commitment with María in San Clemente. The thirty minute bus ride from Pisco to San Clemente makes us grind out teeth since we know it takes us that same amount of time by bike, but those are in temporary storage in Ica as we attempt to finalize our plans. To be fair, the only reason busing takes so long is that the main roads of Pisco are undergoing major reconstruction in preparation for the 2 year anniversary of the earthquake.
María is not there when we arrive. Granted, we are 10 minutes late, but we have yet to arrive someplace 10 minutes late and not end up being 20 minutes early. But she never shows up. We have here number packed away in some bag back in Ica so we cannot call her. Instead we decide to stop by her house, meanwhile looking for other places to rent. Surprisingly, many different places in the communities are renting rooms. Not one of them has a sign outside advertising a room to rent, which seems odd. Many of them are full with customers and it is also interesting to note that some of the rooms are in fact quite expensive. Seems there is quite a range in demand and some people are working in the area with pretty chunky salaries relative to what one might expect. In fact, nearly every house with two stories and made of brick (which means it didn´t fall or was newly built after the quake) rents rooms.
One of the places we find seems to fit the bill. It has the cheapest rooms we have found yet and offers space for bikes to be stored safely, electricity, and a large clothes washing area. The owner of the place informs us that she keeps this place here at a cheaper pice and runs a more expensive lodging on the more densely populated and touristic side of San Clemente. We give her confirmation that we are interested but since we have the night elsewhere already we will hold off on finalizing everything. When we stop by María´s home she is not there, so we opt for leaving a note hanging on her door letting her know what our phone number is and apologizing if we had missed her due to our tardiness.
For dinner, we stop by a bread post and pick up what looks like some different bread than usual. Add some fruits into the mix and we are set. The breads are definitely different from the usual selection of 4 different types and Adam gobbles them down with tasty slices of apple. The total dinner price for us all to eat more than we need comes to $1.50. Bed.
We have decided to do our pilot post-disaster reconstruction participatory video as a means of NGO feedback in a semi-rural community outside of the city of Ica. The community we have chosen is in fact a group of three very small communities all clustered together. The total population we will be working with is approximately 250 families. This place is quite organized and already has a community center for us to work in. We have sealed our fate by letting a community leader know and will be moving in tomorrow.
There still exists the possibility of working there and in San Clemente, especially since María got back to us and has a place for us to stay for real cheap if we want to try and move back and forth.
Later we can post a complete list of the communities we were choosing from and a simple guide we used to decide.
Saturday, 25 July
For Peruvians, Saturday is also a rest day. But not everybody rests. The market for instance actually shows up in full force. As did the misty clouds this morning in Ica as well as San Clemente. Javier Uriano, a consultant for Proética a transparency NGO, also chose to organize another large survey over a large portion of the city of San Clemente. His goals are to see what the advance in reconstruction in the area has been in terms of homes specifically. This is a continued effort from the week before, with the iignificant additional twist that today we must also try and do all the homes whose inhabitants were not to be found as well as the places that were simply unlocateable due to lack of street signs, numbers, and local understanding of the municipalities arbitrary nomenclature for the shantytowns set up for immediate (but slowly more permanent) relief.
Anways, moral of the story is we helped them out again and it was another day long affair. It is useful to get a better feel for the layout of the land, however. We also had the opportunity to visit a couple of outlying clusters of towns, where the chickens for the pollerías probably don´t but conceivably could come from.
For the mission, there are two leaders – one from Proética and the other from a group of journalists in Ica named Martín Flores – one other college student besides myself, 7 members of the local Comité de Defensa Civil (Civil Defense Committee – they defend rights not tanks) and 2 volunteers from the community itself. Its a good group and at the end we exchange bitter stories of angry dogs, neighbors who give bad directions, lack of inhabitance in homes far away, and the general dispersal of the surveys. We were strictly ordered to meet back for lunch and wrap things up by 2:30pm, but I was impressed by my compadres drive to finish their lists of names, some of them staying out past 3:15pm.
Lunch was a massive chowdown on chinese food, see heavy pixel concentration to the right, which they affectionately have termed ´Chifa´ here.From there I have a long-scheduled meeting to see 30 highschool girls do a video program on civil society issues. It is held in a bare, local TV filming station and the program is quite low-quality. The girls attempt to illicit calls from children who work but it seemed no one was watching, so they simply kept opting for commercial breaks. Gotta admire the girls for trying. We spoke to the 5 girls that actually showed up about their interest level in helping teach rural kids some of their camera skills. They giggled and laughed and whispered and nodded and said yeah it sounded interesting with faces that said “What movie should we see tonite? OMG, my boy just texted me!” We´ll plan for without them at the time being.
From there we head to the cheap internet place to catch up on e-mail and even facebook for the first time in about 2 months. How many is so many ignored invites? More than very many, anyways? We can´t update the blog today because its saved on another disk so are avid readers will have to suffer at least another 15 hours. Then we find a place in San Clemente since it is much cheaper to stay than Pisco. Tomorrow we plan to set things in motion for staying in Nueva Esperanza. Wish us luck.
Friday, 24 July
On the ground during a social science project, how does one make the in-between decisions best? The overarching conceptural decisions usually develop naturally. The minute details take care of themselves, and usually end up working out fine if you put the effort and time into doing them right. But its those in-between, and equally important decisions that really make you go back and forth like a poorly designed website.
For instance, the overarching goals of what we would do over the last few weeks of our project developed on its own mostly. And the minute details will work themselves out. But right now we need to make the in-between decisions, the intermediate decisions. We have to decide which community(ies) we will work in. We have to decide where to live during this time. We have to decide what order to set up our meetings for.
We have to make some of those by Monday – latest. We should've made those decisions by last Monday, but we spent a week plus trying to research the required information to make the best decision – especially which community to choose since this is huge, grandote, killer-difference-maker, chick-chick-BANG.
Since we have no community chosen for sure, we are unable to find a place to rent for long term. This means we have to pay three times as much for each night. So we decide to pull the plug and just choose San Clemente to work in. We've found a place for cheap in the community we will be working closest with. We show up with all our stuff this morning and to our dismay the owner pulls a fast one on us and informs us that since we have a computer with us we will be responsible for paying the difference between her regular electricity bill and the one that comes out during our stay. She thinks this will add 35 soles to the monthly price – an increase of over 40% in total price. In the end this price is not that high, but we don't like having fast ones pulled on us so we ask to leave our stuff there as we look around for a new place.
We head randomly asking around some more until we arrive at a neighboring community called Agua Santa. Apparently there a good smattering of NGOs working there as well, or so Adam thinks. We find a great place, with a single room on the roof. It sits overlooking a grassy park and even a bit of the outlying farms. The main road is close-by, and there is even a nice interior road that runs right the front – think like a bike. The family is a bunch of professors, real nice people, and are ok with us using their kitchen sometimes. Electricity (at no extra cost), clothes washing buckets and a clothesline. Price is $/. 100 soles which is pretty decent considering they are cleaning up the place for us and even putting in an outlet.
We look at each other a bit and say ok, we'll take it. We pay them up front. We head back to get our bags from the other place and drop them off. From there we head off to conquer the world. As we walk we realize that our place is situated in a community that is not exactly the most NGO-intervened community in San Clemente. In fact it is a good 10 minute walk away from the more NGO-intervened community of Santa Rosa. In addition, we suddenly remember the rural community of Nueva Esperanza outside of Ica. This community had struck us as well-organized, with a well-used multi-purpose community center. Two NGOs had done housing projects in the area already, and another was currently underway. Each project was differently done in many different ways. More than that, the area has a very secluded feel, a more rural, more communal and open feel. Maybe our time constraint means we should focus more on a community like this?
But we just paid 100 soles to stay here a month. We pow-wow and agree that its best to humbly apologize and grovel for our money back. We end up offering them 10 soles to leave our bags behind for the day and night, but gratefully take the 100 soles back off their hands. Whew.
From there we decide to come up with a more rigorous metric for choosing our community. But first lunch.
After aji de gallina and arroz and chicken soup and fried chicken and white beans we head over to the community of Santa Rosa to get to know them better. How aware are they of the NGOs working in their region? How friendly and curious do they feel? Can we find any local community centers, any youth running around with interest in a video camera project? The first few tries really arent very promising. Especially after we asked a person working on a house for an NGO and he told us that he knew of no NGOs that were working in this community itself but that some were elsewhere. We thought for sure he must be misunderstanding us, but after a good minute of clarification he had us convinced. He was unaware. Then we asked another two random community members out for a walk who racked their brains for a bit and then told us to ask someone else, but that yes there was a good bit of construction going around in the community. Wow. Thanks, sistas.
With time we found a multi-purpose room that might be employable but the owner is not around to find out for sure. In addition, we head over to a Red Cross/Emergency Architects meeting with the beneficiaries and they seem to be quite interested in the project. They convince us that such a project would work great in their community and are in fact quite organized with some youth who would be interested for sure. Exchanging of a few phone numbers and we have some promises to follow through if we just give them a call. Great.
We have decided to pay an emergency visit to Nueva Esperanza. We make another rash decision and jump on a bus for Ica. Then we call Ingrid, from APORTES, the only NGO that is currently working in Nueva Esperanza. Turns out they are actualy headed over later tonight, right about the time we are planning on arriving. Sometimes rash decisions pay dividends – by pure luck. The trick seems to be make rash decisions and make the best outta whatever shade of luck surfaces.
After the hour bus ride, and a 8 minute taxi ride we arrive with 30 mins to spare at the APORTES office. It is here that we sit down and make our little project selection matrix of criteria and possible communities. We have about 8 communities we are comparing. We come up with 11 different criteria that are most important to us. We weight the criteria so that the sum adds to 1. Then we come up with a 1 to 5 ranking system for each criteria and hang an appropriate number to each matrix square. This system is unfortunately very wishy washy but the decision process for such things is this way. Oh and MIT teaches you how to do this and we spent weeks on it – on such a simple obvious thing...
On the way to Nueva Esperanza, we learn that the community we were thinking of is actually a conglomerate of three: Nueva Esperanza, Señor de Lurén, and Mancocapa. They are more like streets, and less like blocks, and can be covered by walking in 10 mins. Upon arrival we see a flock of youth playing volleyball in the middle of the dirt road. Smaller children were to the side playing in the dried river. We end up breaking up a Women´s Meeting going on in the community center. They immediately take to the idea of a video camera project for the area. Three of the participants are above 16 years but less than 20, and agree they´d be interested in working with us for sure. They admit that they don´t have great luxuries to offer us if we wish to stay. That is a good thing, we say. We´d prefer to hang out how they hang out. Eat how they eat. At this they lighten up even more and start chatting about who can host us and how they can set up a rotation for cooking our meals. We mention we´d like to cook alongside them to learn from them, and there eyes brighten even more still.
After 20 minutes of introductions and talk of life, a group of men join us – the testosteroneated half of the town´s directive committee. Turns out the President is headed off to Arequipa for the holidays (Independence Day is next week!) and he has called an emergency meeting to pass off official power to the vice-president for the time being. From here, the women who do not double as committee members escort me around the town, stopping as the pass each others house to say goodbye´s. There was Paola, a great-grandma at least, Julia with stretched, acknowledgin eyes, Adrianna who insisted we talk till I was convinced their community was the one, and Pamela and Alison who are teenagers and best friends. At the oldest lady´s house they pull out a flask of wine from her stash. She cracks a wrinkled, toothless smile, then takes a swig before offering it around.
After dropping off Julia, Adrianna pulls out a clear bottle from her pocket and grins. “Ready to change colors?” Meet Pisco, the local liquor. Warm like tequila – also made similar just switch agave for grapes.
Adrianna leaves us, and from there the teenagers pull out a volleyball and start knocking it around. It is here that I realize what is going on. This was the rural Peruvian version of heavy recruiting.
The meeting over, and we are headed back to Ica where we will spend the night. We now have two very promising communities to choose from. Can we do both somehow? We tell them we will get back to them on Monday. In the meantime we will do some serious soul-searching, that is if we have souls. Otherwise we would be wasting our time right?
Do you think humans have souls? If so, what purpose do they serve? If not, where does meaning live?
Thursday, July 23
Today there is a day long conference sponsored by the Peruvian Ministry of Housing on the topic of seismic-resistant housing. Adam says it looks really interesting since they are bringing in engineers with specialties in adobe and quincha, which we know nothing about in the US. Brooke says we should go search for a place to rent long-term (a month).
Needless to say, we begin our home search by walking around randomly, but winding our way towards Santa Rosa, where Brooke remembers meeting María´s sister. The sister kindly escorts us down the hill a bit farther to María´s humble wooden shack on the very edge of town. María is an active member of San Clemente who feels very strongly that she has been discriminated against by Cruz Roja in the housing beneficiary selection process. She decided to do something about it and has worked with others who apparently share her sentiments to draft an official complaint complete with signatures and multiple trips to Cruz Roja hq in Lima.
Last time we met María, she had offered to help us find a place to live if ever we were to stay in San Clemente, and she does not fail to follow through. She first offers to rearrange her temporary wooden shell of a home to accomadate us but we kindly refuse for every reason that one could think of. After some discussion she determines that the best place for us is with her family members who live nearby and will take us there tomorrow at 4pm. Good for us, since we will
From there we head to Pisco where we have a 11am meeting with Jaime Mok from Paz y Esperanza. He is a great guy, and we are interested in seeing what his masters thesis is about and also hear feedback on our upcoming project. The meeting goes great and he encourages us to spend significant time thinking about where we do the project and how to narrow it so that we don´t overload ourselves. He knows from experience how long it often takes to get projects rolling if you want to do it in a participative process. By the way, Jaime is doing a long-distance masters through a University here colloquily called La Católica. His thesis is on the participative housing process carried out by a tripod housing and development effort by Cruz Roja, Paz y Esperanza, and Acción Contra el Hambre.
After Jaime is done splashing us with his wisdom, we attempt, once again, to meet up with Arsídias to confirm the details for the Saturday meeting with the youth TV reporters. He is not there but is expected to come later. Greeting our more reliable friend, Michael the gate guard, we find out that the swine flu is causing such a scare throughout Perú and they are considering lengthing the two-week cancellation of classes to three weeks to prevent the spread. People are especially worried about increased infections in places with high rates of malnutrition, like Puno. If you don´t know anything about Puno, please check it out online. It is the coldest place in Perú and children are dying bying the hundreds from lack of warmth and food. Since we have been here, many different organizations have been running food and clothing drives for the children of Puno. We really hope to visit before we leave to know for ourselves.
Giving up on Arsídias, we decide lunch and seismic-resistant housing is a better use of our time. Carapulcra con sopa seca from the market topped off with some sweet breads fresh out of a street bread oven. At the conference we greet the various NGO workers we recognize including Henry, Segundo, and the bamboo architects from CEAS. We walk in on time for the Adobe lecture, which turns out to be decently interesting. It is amazing how much work and study has gone into adobe around the world since it is the only feasible alternative for a large percentage of the world´s population. The take aways from this lecture were basically that:
Adobe will be used so we must try and make it as safe as possible
Adobe weak points are the corners, and wall sections that are not properly tied into the roof or second floor diaphragm.
There are 5 story houses built of adobe that are seismic resistant and lasted the earthquake with cracks comparable to concrete buildings of its size
To make adobe that strong it requires serious time and very massive walls.
Adobe is best if limited to a first floor with second floor walls of lighter material such as quincha
Undoubtedly, the other lectures were also quite interesting and we wish we could stay longer but we already have our 4pm commitment with María in San Clemente. The thirty minute bus ride from Pisco to San Clemente makes us grind out teeth since we know it takes us that same amount of time by bike, but those are in temporary storage in Ica as we attempt to finalize our plans. To be fair, the only reason busing takes so long is that the main roads of Pisco are undergoing major reconstruction in preparation for the 2 year anniversary of the earthquake.
María is not there when we arrive. Granted, we are 10 minutes late, but we have yet to arrive someplace 10 minutes late and not end up being 20 minutes early. But she never shows up. We have here number packed away in some bag back in Ica so we cannot call her. Instead we decide to stop by her house, meanwhile looking for other places to rent. Surprisingly, many different places in the communities are renting rooms. Not one of them has a sign outside advertising a room to rent, which seems odd. Many of them are full with customers and it is also interesting to note that some of the rooms are in fact quite expensive. Seems there is quite a range in demand and some people are working in the area with pretty chunky salaries relative to what one might expect. In fact, nearly every house with two stories and made of brick (which means it didn´t fall or was newly built after the quake) rents rooms.
One of the places we find seems to fit the bill. It has the cheapest rooms we have found yet and offers space for bikes to be stored safely, electricity, and a large clothes washing area. The owner of the place informs us that she keeps this place here at a cheaper pice and runs a more expensive lodging on the more densely populated and touristic side of San Clemente. We give her confirmation that we are interested but since we have the night elsewhere already we will hold off on finalizing everything. When we stop by María´s home she is not there, so we opt for leaving a note hanging on her door letting her know what our phone number is and apologizing if we had missed her due to our tardiness.
For dinner, we stop by a bread post and pick up what looks like some different bread than usual. Add some fruits into the mix and we are set. The breads are definitely different from the usual selection of 4 different types and Adam gobbles them down with tasty slices of apple. The total dinner price for us all to eat more than we need comes to $1.50. Bed.
I can attest to the Puno being very cold thing. It was very cold.
ReplyDeleteAnd they have floating islands on Lake Titicaca. En serio. I was astounded by this.
Also I think humans have souls. If you had come to Nasca you could have heard some preaching in the plaza de armas about this. I even got a free pamphlet from a nearby souvenir store about it.
-Lindsey
ps: hola from my free internet in nasca!