Monday, July 6, 2009

The Flood






Sunday, July 5 The 60 mile bike ride to Ica
¨I want to sleep, eat, pee, and get off my bike all at the same time.¨
¨This is like the first day of lacrosse practice - just it never ends.¨

Wake up at 6. Eat some brekkie. Start packing up, but it takes forever and lindsey is good at being like omg i'm going to the bathroom and disappearing for an hour. Look at a view at La Mina in the reserve. Oh that was nice. It was 7 km in the wrong direction. Then a really really big hill, not so big as the one adam rolls down to check out the view from down below, but there's nothing so he has to come back up. Ride to El Chaco, a town just north of Paracas, get lunch and an interview. Still going the wrong direction, but we need to meet up with the intersection for the Panamericana, the only route from Pisco to Ica. After the break, we head east. We stop about 11 km away to buy piña yogurt and oranges for the long ride, adjust our bikes which are already hurting, switch packs to evenly hurt all parts of our backs. About 2o km in we hit up a brotherhood of 8 or 9 (or 50 depending on who you ask) hills one after another. Lindsey says she'll remember one in particular for whatever is left of her life. The next rest stop consists of Inca Kola on the side of the road. After those hills the rest of the ride is gradually uphill for another 4 hours of biking. A total of 6 hours biking, but it was a full day starting from 9am and ending with our triumphant arrival at the center of the central square of Ica at 6pm. (Immediately upon our arrival we realized Ica was different than Pisco or Chincha, especially when the policemen told us to not ride on the pretty tiles surrounding the concrete structure in the middle of the square.)

As for lodging, everything is much more expensive than other places, as we had been warned. After a bit of searching, we find a place for about 7/10ths of our two week stay in Pisco for just two nights = 70 soles. While Lindsey chills out, we grab 3 hamburgers, a muffin, water, and a portion of fries. She warms up on them, then we go out for dinner. We buy 13 bananas, 2.5 liters of water, 3 small egg/spinach sandwiches, 2 bowls of soup, a portion of meat and rice, a portion of noodles veggies and meats, and three bags of emolient tea (which, is made with “cat nail” by the way..). Celebrating our arrival! Next time you see Lindsey, give her a pat on the back since this was by far the farthest she´s ever biked, and ended up finishing strong all the way through, far exceeding Adam´s expectations. Josie are you reading this?

After returning we attempt to work to update our budget, but keep falling asleepppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz


Saturday, July 4 Happy Fourth of July
¨Quiero un helado bien helado y azucar con galletitas de animal al lado.¨

It´s kind of become a morning routine that the ladies lie around in bed snoozin´ while the resident hombre heads out to hunt and gather food. Today he brings back some natural flavored yogurt from the plaza and more fruits to add to our collection from yesterday. However, when he pours the yogurt into a bowl of fruit, he notices more chunks than seems right. After a little test sip, our suspicions are confirmed. Nast-tastic. He heads back to the plaza to argue our case for a replacement yogurt and after many taste testers at the store claim that ¨maybe that´s how natural yogurt is supposed to taste¨, he finally helps them realize that no they would not want to drink that crap. He is allowed to bring home another yogurt, but not the same flavor, because the store people think that
a. maybe Adam (and they themselves) don´t fully understand what natural yogurt should taste like
b. maybe the whole batch of that kind is bad

So after Adam goes back and forth between our little home and the plaza a billion times, we are still not done with the packing that we began quite a while ago. We finish up and eat lots and lots of non-gross lucuma yogurt and many fruits before heading out to San Andres where we hit up our fav smoothie lady one last time or a mixture of papaya, naranja, and some of our old lechuga and fugly bananas. Lorena will greatly miss her and her delicious, non-watered down mixtures of love and nutrition but was too embarrassed to try and express that sentiment in Spanish.

Then comes the first leg of our two-day biking extravaganza. We arrive in Paracas in time for dinner and after Lorena heads into town to say hey to the tourism lady and use her cushy bathroom, she also grabs an emergency ice cream sandwich. She returns to find Brooke carving a puppy (which looks strangely like a beaver) out of a carrot stick while feeding the non-puppy scraps to a happy little conejo at her side named Adam. She proves the goodness of the knife-sharpening job that that knife sharpening man in Pisco did by cutting herself in the finger with the sharp knife. When Brooke finishes her creation (which looks more like a kangaroo after we bite off the front legs), we go into town for some carrots, corn, pimiento, queso, galletas, and manzanas for our dinner later that night. At the store, we meet Obama, the owner’s black cat, and Lorena falls in love with a tiny gatito who lets her pet him while the grownups shop for food.

We hurry along to the national park cuz it’s getting kind of dark and after too many too many too many hills we arrive at the puesto de control de Lagunilla and set up our tent in lots of wind near a little cliff above the ocean. The man at the control post tells us we might get sprayed with ocean water during the night but we decide to take our chances and hang out there. We eat our cheese and crackers and fruits and raw corn (Brooke claims that this is in fact a thing you can do) and feel kind of French despite Adam’s realization that it’s the Fourth of July!

After telling some stories while huddling together in our little tent, we drift off into un-sleep to the soothing sounds of the thunderous waves and intense wind, wondering what the view will look like in the morning.


Friday 03 July Fridays are busy
¨I watched Michael Jackson...and a fortune telling monkey...and suprise helado with chocolate on top.¨

This morning we were rudely awaken by a man who stormed the room with fresh fruit and a big smile, all talking 'bout how his bike had broken and how he had brought us breakfast in bed. Stupid Adam. Then he also told us that we should be ready to leave the room in five minutes flat, straight from horizontal. Because that was feasible. So we took an hour and five minutes to get to the market and take a 40 minute collectivo to San Clemente. So in the thick of our rush, Cristian called us all like, be here in 10 minutes. And we were like, yeah, not possible. Cristian was a surprising new addition to our day, but welcomed.

So we half walked, half took a collectivo towards San Clemente where Cristian waited patiently for us. We split up to cover more ground for the day. Chincha with Cristian to see the documentary/research that he is doing in Grocio Prado for which he is being paid for by Cáritas. Unfortunately, something happened to the lens of our main video camera and it is not working at the moment. Good thing it is the weekend so we have some time to look to get it replaced since it is still under warranty and also insured, so doubly protected. Replacements down here are quite expensive unfortunately so we´ll see what we can get. Until then we will use FlipCams.

In the afternoon we hit up a capacity building workshop for local community leaders on the topic of project selection using basic CLIOS methods. The event was headed up by two NGOs, CEAS (episcopalian social action) and CODEHICA (commision for human rights in Ica). We got home real late from this meeting because we spend the next couple hours exchanging footage with Cristian at his team´s office.

From there we have just enough time to eat a quick dinner before heading back home to sleep up for the bike trip tomorrow to the Paracas National Marine Reserve, a very special place for envirolovers. Its unique biodiversity (I saw some birds) is because the sierra reaches the coast at this single point.


Thursday 2 July Crosses come mostly in red
¨You can´t just toss someone in and give them tripe.¨
¨I´m gonna kill you. Aaaaeeeeehhhhhhaaaeehhheeeeaaaeeee. Don´t tickle me. Aaaeee…¨

What factors determine who shows up to community meetings with NGOs? Does education correlate? Does rural vs urban matter, or dispersion of community members? Is it largely a function of individual personality or does it depend largely on group dynamics?

This is a tale about a goat. No, no, many goats. Of the herded variety. They live in Cabeza de Toro, a rural town approximately one hour east and slightly north of Pisco. Every day they go out with a real nice guy who hangs out with them while they gorge themselves on the coastal grasses of the outlying chacras (farms). Then they come home and discuss how they hope to one day have their fuzzy faces appear on TV in a documentary made by foreign college kids. The end.

Thank you Jesus for getting us and five other International Fed. of the Red Cross workers safely to fulfill the dreams of the goats. Jesus, the driver, is the most fun one in the group, and enjoys manhandling the Land Cruiser There is also Richard, a dance teacher who volunteers, Martin, Edwin, and a couple others who neither of us had the chance to interact with. We headed out for this trip at 2pm and didn’t get back till six thirty. The meeting was about VCA (Vulnerabilities and Capacities Assessment). Turns out that Risk (R) = AxV/C where A=Amenazas (Threats).
That was about as far as we got, though, since not enough people showed up to the meeting, so the Red Cross reps decided to hold a more chill meeting and postpone the group activity that they had planned. In addition, the participants hadn´t completed a small homework assignment that would make the conversation much more enriching. We were not too disappointed, as we have sat through a Saturday long workshop on this same topic in the more urban setting of a hotel in Chincha with Red Cross Peruana. It was appropriate to experience firsthand the rural dispersal of participants in Cabeza de Toro created a clear obstacle for bringing the people together for NGO meetings.

After returning to the Red Cross office, we found another meeting going on on the premises. This meeting was actually a better source for footage for us as it was the first class of a 7-week course on preparing community and municipal leaders on how to work with community members to learn about their history and help them prioritize what projects they feel are needed for minimizing the risks they face every day. Basically, this meeting was intended to teach the same as the meeting we had just had cancelled. In one place it was not able to happen, in the other it took place with flying colors and the people were participating avidly in teams without knowing each other beforehand, and producing colorful papelotas (big papers) for understanding the history of their hometowns. And there was ham and cheese sandwiches, and then cake later, and coke.

So, before the Red Cross our day consisted of an early morning interview with ADRA Peru, an Adventists affiliated NGO with a strong presence in the region due to its cooperation with the George Bush-friendly Hunt Oil Corporation that is one of the large players in the exploration known as the Camisea Project. Look it up, its hot. So, Hunt is like, yo we´ll give back to the community by giving some money towards building up the capacity of the local governments in the area we are destroying – in this case they have doubled the size of an oil platform in Pisco to handle the oil being pumped from the Amazon as we speak. So, ADRA is working on Governance and Democracy. Their regional coordinator, Carlos Morales is always very busy but he takes 30 minutes out of his schedule this morning for the interview.

From this interview we learned that is not best to interview NGO reps when they have a tight schedule and a lot on their plate. Turns out you get cookie cutter answers and less insightful answers by orders of magnitude. Nuff said. We will meet him again someday and maybe then…

After this meeting we had a smothie at our new smoothie place, a couple breakfast sandwiches, carapulcra, causa rellena (whipped potato cake with chicken as frosting and a ceviche (raw fish in lime) on the side). After hanging out for a bit, Brooke had the great idea of making sundaes for lunch. At the mention of ice cream, Lindsey was down, so we bought milk and 3 bananas and headed for the ice cream shop. Lindsey is a regular, as was Josie, her predecessor, so the ice cream guy lets us use his glasses and silverware to make the sundaes/splits. 4 scoops of ice cream, bananas, chocalate syrup all doused in whole milk. In the meantime, however, we are blindsided by a guy selling candy from a cart. It looks terribly sugary, so Lindsey goes crazy and buys 20 little animal crackers with a huge dosage of sugar on each. Lindsey had only whetted her appetite however, and bought an unspecified number of personal sized ice cream cones. One was bought for her by a new friend we made from Alaska, Joe, who works as a Remote Wilderness Recreation Consultant and is down here helping start a scalloping tourism adventure in the Paracas area. He is way cooler than us, and has friends that are twice as cool as him in any one arena but are professionals. He also is biking around so we may joing him for a bike road. His bike is a lot nicer than ours. He likes ice cream and other tasty morsels, so him and Lindsey hit it off like old roommates.

After chilling with Joe Alaska we head over to prepare for the Red Cross. And the goats.

After the goats, we eat dinner of a cowfeet stew on rice for Lindsey and Adam, bread for Adam, chicken and vegetable soup for Brooke, ice cream for Lindsey, hamburger for Lindsey, emoliente tea (herbal) for all of us, and french fries with avocado for all of us.

We ate like royalty today. And it all came out at $12 total for all 3.


Wednesday 1 July To-Do lists. Checklists. Do them.
“Let’s do an encuesta. We can ask people what they would prefer as a night cap: ice cream or lettuce. And I’m betting you the ice cream is gonna win out, okay?”

We only had one thing planned for today: an interview with the head macho man of ADRA at 3pm in the Plazuela Belen. Free day! So we wrote down everything we wanted to get done before heading out to Ica at the end of this week.

1. Go to Chincha to retrieve stuff
2. Hang with Pisco Sin Fronteras during their English class with COPRODELI (yet another NGO as aforementioned yesterday)
3. Get Lindsey’s hair braided into corn rows
4. Work on standardizing some of the interviews we’ve done in the past
5. Run over to San Clemente to interview the mayor.
6. ADRA interview

Long list, right? Well, we managed to get most of it done. In fact, we got it all done except for what we had an appointment to do. Here’s a picture of some of the more important things we checked off our list today:

(insert picture of Lindsey’s hairs)

Highlights from San Clemente and El Molino: Lindsey plays with small children who are learning English. She receives hugs and requests to be spun around from eager school kids who tug on her sleeves and ask her to sit next to them. She got to see the most beautiful plaza in the entirety or Peru in San Clemente. In El Molino, she drank a coke. In other news, it is cold here at night.

Highlights from Chincha: Witnessed a small girl screaming for ice cream while waiting on the bus. Reminds us eerily of Lindsey. Encounter a Choche in his natural environment and manage to reminisce about a place neither of us has been – Arequipa. Excitedly get the power cord and sewing kit for endeavors yet to be seen. The future is coming!

First stop in San Clemente to talk with the general coordinator in the mayor’s office there. She is very knowledgeable and tells us all about the way her and the nearby municipalities work. Conveniently, she had worked in an NGO for awhile. She gave us detailed information on the NGOs working in San Clemente and its surrounding area and also gave us a level-headed perspective on how the municipality has moved forward with reconstruction according to the main priority of basic services, mostly water.

Next, off to COPRODELI to hang with PSF while they teach kids English. Four volunteers including Britni, Sean, and Claire, led the classes. All of the kids were very excited, incredibly rambunctious, and ready to play games with the volunteers. They learned the “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” song as well as “hokey pokey.” There was something for everybody, and even the volunteers learned something new!

Then we meet back in the Plazuela Belen to check up on ADRA. The office is absolutely buzzing, but the jefe isn’t there. So we make an early appointment for tomorrow morning to take this to its end once and for all.

Back at the homestead, we organize mucho más. I wouldn’t say it’s like pulling teeth, but it’s like pulling teeth. Actually, in some sense it’s good to remember what we’ve done so we can prepare for Ica. Maybe then our research will be more poignant. Once we’ve had our fill, we make like trees and leave for the market to meet with Fate. Fate is actually a girl named Carito who we met when she and her beautiful cornrows were strutting down the street from the Plaza de Armas with a group of friends. Lindsey pulled over and asked Carito where she had gotten her hair done and made an appointment right then and there. And that was that. And this is now. Now, she looks like that picture. And we look like sleeping beauties.


Tuesday 30 June How can we help you?
“Don’t let Señor Perro run your life. It happened to me once. Never again.”

Here we are again. Sitting on rocks, hands in our pockets with fidgeting legs in front of the Pisco Sin Frontera's house. One is scratching his head over the disappearance of his work shirt. Another is basking in sun before the day of manual labor sets into full swing. All the rest are scurrying to lace their shoes, slather on sunscreen, and don their matching blue t-shirts. Everyone is a little curious; some ask if we've just arrived and congratulations, where did you come from, how long are you staying, the work is fun but its hard, my name is David, Vikki, Jeni, Harold, and so forth.

The morning meeting is at 8am, people walk over to the concrete pour at 9:15, but the program coordinator doesn't leave the house until 10:00. Surrounded by pieces of paper full of messy jots and squiggles of words, Jen is perched on a nest of sheets, peering over the projects that have been labeled “on hold,” “need to call,” and the oh so wanted “completed,” She has another volunteer named Vikki call some of the people that they plan on visiting so that they don't waste money on transportation only to find out that no one is home. Some calls have bad numbers. Others are picked up by seven-year-old girls who also happen to be the oldest person home for the remainder of the day. Despite all this, Jen and Vikki manage to accumulate a stack thicker than I can imagine two people being able to accomplish in one day. Then, we head out.

We take a mototaxi to our first site on Comercio 440 Street. Here, we find a woman who has a land title as well as some governmental aid towards building her house. However, she can't afford the labor to break through the cracked concrete foundations to start building the sewage lines that she needs to begin her house. However, the trench lines aren't marked out, and she doesn't know how deep she should make them. PSF has a very narrow selection metrics. The people who can receive help must have a land title to the terrain that will be worked on, the approval of an architect or engineer for any heavy technical jobs, and the materials to work with. PSF also aims to make sure that they aren't taking money away from the local economy. As Jen puts it, “If they're living in a two story house and they want us to dig a hole for their two car garage, it's obviously not what we are looking for because they obviously have the money to be hiring local labor.”

Afterwards, we headed back to the house to work on making lists of all the organizations we've interviewed, all he meetings that we've attended, and all the other footage that we've taken. We also prep ourselves for our meeting in the small shantytown of El Molino with COPRODELI in the afternoon. We've standardized our questionnaire, added a few other questions, and made sure that we have copies with us at all times. The sun is glaring today. Everything has a haze from the beating rays. The interview goes well, and we learn that this fledgling organization has only been here for about 6 months. Since we interview a field worker, the answers we get mostly concern the way she interacts with the community. We've discovered that we need much different questions depending on whether we talk with an admin or other staff. Jessica tells us about the process of selecting 30 children from hundreds of candidates in the area. She and a professor surveyed the entire region, looking for the poorest of the joven pueblo. She runs the place herself, accompanied by 5 volunteers who are here daily and a couple of medics who come by 3 days a week to offer check ups for 1 sole (aka 30 american cents).

After Lorena waves bye to some kids like fifty million times, we finally escape the grasps of the C.A.E. (Centro Atención Externa). Then our stubby, little legs bring us all the way back to the Plazuela Belen where Adam introduces us to his newest girl: 50 centimos sandwich lady with 1.00 sole liquados. Heaven. We buy a little milk for a banana honey and milk smoothie which she only charges 50 centimos for since we had all the ingredients already. We watch for the ADRA people to come back to the office from their lunch break, but to no avail. They walk in the back door, and the man we want to interview never came back. In fact, he went to Lima. So we make some calls to the remaining NGOs we hoped to talk with and score one in Humay, an hour away in the mountains. The other one, Tierra de Hombres has relocated out of Pisco and back to Lima.

So we fly through the market, hold our hands out, collect food for our ravenous mouths, and hit up the hotel for a sandwich making party. Lettuce, avocados, cheese like no one's business. All for less than a dollar each. We've getting good at this cheap food game.

So we hippity hoppity boppity'd onto a collectivo towards Humay for 3 soles each (think dollar taxi ride for an hour). The sun was setting pretty quickly by the time we ended up on the foothills of the little town of 90 families. The church that used to be has been entirely cleared out and replaced with a modular home. Such is the story with many of the leveled religious centers in Peru. The strong sense of community from religion, however, is something that Cáritas uses for their advantage. Cáritas carries itself very close to the church. For example, Luis is staying in a building on the main square that is dedicated to housing volunteers and workers related to the parish. As a Catholic organization, Cáritas is able to tap into the pre-established social structure to do its good. This way they don't have to form and mobilize new groups of people who may not know each other yet. Church is a very powerful tool for activating a community... Thanks Caesar McDowell and Sebastiao Ferreria.

Luis Peña Muñoz is a great interview despite our camera who can’t see through the shadows that are cast over his face from the powerful combination of falling daylight and brimmed hats . He tells about how the entire team did surveys of the entire town to find out the needs. Cáritas is a global organization, but the arms of the group set down in small communities in needy places so that the work they do is focusing on one community at a time. They also work to make their talks demonstrative as well as participative in order to help make their point stick better. There is a set-up for hand washing workshops. There is also a small kitchen and cooking example for nutrition lectures complete with little stoves. As Ascensión from the Red Cross might say, Cáritas wants to do the hardware (houses) as well as the software (social development) for the whole package of recovery. Not just to clear the rubble or to build from the ground up, but also to enrich and strengthen the community’s social fabric (as Dan from ASPEm would say).

One thing Luis tried to stick with us before we left was the idea that there aren't many engineers who will go through the pains of getting an education to be employed somewhere where the pay isn't good. He said he hoped we were that kind of people. Since he has an appointment in Pisco later that night, he accompanies us on the way home, chatting about the earthquake and giving us a little more informal description of his work. It's a nice opportunity to get to know him better.

Back at headquarters, a threat is detected in sector B-019. Alert the main deck and hoist up the emergency flag. Caldo de Gallina for almost half the normal price.. 2 soles! 3 soles with meat! And boy is it delicious. Like Adam's new hair color. Which takes about an hour and a half to tease out a dye job from a set of jolly gay hair dressers in the local salon. They were so happy to chat with some foreigners sobre de todo. And in the end, we all slept like babies.

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