Oopsie Daisies

I think we might be missing a few days here and there

egads. here's the latest:

7 August 2009, Friday
“Yes, french fries of the potatoe and camote variety! And we can make fry sanwiches!”

Ceviche. Homemade. Raw white fish chopped up and swimming in salt, pepper, lime, parsley, ginger, garlic, celery, aji-no-moto, ají, and salt-bathed onions on the side with boiled sweet potatoes, normal potatoes, and lettuce to be the nest of it all. Amazing.

We also have a fish soup that is delicious. Fried fish and rice will have to wait for dinner tho since we are all full as a 50-gallon drum on the day water comes in.

Quotes from the lunch experience.

“This is likely the best lunch I have ever eaten”
“We are eating like kings tonight”
“Kings eat lunch late cuz they can do whatever they want”
“In Boston´s Machu Piccu restaurant this would cost like 70 soles for one meal.”
“This meal cost around 15 soles for 5 of us to be stuffed.”
“I´ll bribe my way to the United States with ceviche in the mouths of immigration.”
“But its an emergency, Sir - my son Adam and daughter Brooke called me from the US and need me to come up to give them ceviche.”

Quechua:
“Yapaih Camouey Caldota” (Go get some more soup)
“Achike. Micuricuña” (We´ve eaten a lot)
“Uhh...Yumm...” (Tasty)

Lunch was the highlight of our lives. Beforehand we had worked out as if we were identical organisms – maybe flagella - and then split up. 1 to the farms to cut down grass and clovers to feed the guinea pigs and the other to the kitchen and the washing buckets. Guess which went where? We´ll give you a hint, it has something to do with gender.

After lunch we cleaned up and then worked on catching up on blogging, writing an official request for the info we need from the Regional government of Ica, and planning for class tomorrow.

Then we were reminded of the Ice Age 3 projection that was being hosted by APORTES, an NGO working here.



6 August 2009, Thursday

Yesterday was our day dedicated to helping out with every bit of the work around the house. So we pushed back meetings till today, which we planned on heading out at 7:30am (skipping our morning workout) and arriving at Ica around 8am.

Our plan is thwarted by the arrival of water in the early morning. Upon waking up at 6:50am, we hear our host mom (Abuelita) struggling with 2 5 gallon buckets full of water. She is trying to give orders to her 40 year old son Juan about where to carry the water to, and stumbles over her slippers, nearly falling. Of course we step in to help. Around the outside of the house there are at least 14 50-gallon drums that Abuelita tries to maintain full at any given time. Water comes rarely during this time of year since the rivers are all dry. A private consortium portions out water at certain times of the week and it is not very regular. The only running water they have is a low tube outside their house. Placing a wide bucket under this they fill larger pails which in turn fill the 50 gallon monstruos. Today is especially hectic because they are also attempting to fill a small reservoir for the construction project they are working on about 200 meters away. To do this they hook up a small pump to one of the 50 gallon drums and let it run like they don´t want to have to be a 200 meter water tube themselves later.

So instead we made like 10 meter water pipes and kept feeding the construction site till it was full and then the other drums and then it was 9am.

So we headed off to Ica but not until 10am. Our first stop put us even farther behind as our USB was returned to us, recovered by nice owners of the internet place. Yeh! Turns out all our info is wiped clean, and instead we have two friendly viruses, and is renamed Henry. To make a long story short, ended up downloading a flash file recovery program and finding some of the stuff we had lost. Everything important seems to be there.

Then we split up again, like people who are together often do. Brooke makes it back in time for an 11am editing and critique meeting with a couple of students. They don´t show up since they are both cooking lunch, so she is ends up not meeting with them till 1pm. Oh well, that just means she has time to learn how to cook mashed white beans and hang out with Arianna.

Adam heads to Ica to try and find more academic info on the two caseríos we are living in. It seems no research has really been done on the region except for a couple basic base line studies done by a couple NGOs very recently. Coming in we expected the older community members to be the best sources of info, but we also expected other research to exist somewhere – at least the municipality, right? Nope. Trust Adam. The best we could get from the Municipality of La Tinguiña (equivalent of a town municipality), was a two page document describing the basic history of La Tinguiña. Absolutely nothing more specific about the two caseríos and no statistical information on them whatsoever. Same with the Provincial Gobierno of Ica (equivalent of county). The Gobierno Regional of Ica (equivalent of state) doesn´t allow anyone in with shorts. WTF? After 10 mins on the phone with the Natural Resources engineer, we are able to convince him that even though we don´t have any ID with us whatsoever we are friendly American students looking for info for a research project. The only info they have is some soil borings nearby and general risk assessment studies that have been made into a map of general risks facing Ica.

We´ll take it.

Defensoría del Pueblo is really nice but they have no info. Contrary to intel we had received from another NGO, they are not doing any NGO evaluation/monitoring work at all. PNUD is out of the office. CODEHICA is super busy planning for the 2 year anniversary of the quake. CODEHICA´s children-focused wing agrees to an interview but we would need to coordinate through someone who wasn´t at the office at the time. Cáritas´s director wasn´t there and was gonna be there in “a couple minutes”. 20 mins later Adam got up and left, sick of waiting in offices. So he hung out in a park and watched an old man make modern art walk-shapes around and through the park. And ate lunch he´d packed.

Adam picked up water, bananas, and a box of tea bags for the family before heading back home.

Class starts at 6:30 but some kids think its 6. We show up in time to hang out with them till the rest of the students show up. We expect less of a turnout on a Thursday night, and it turns out to be true. From every group (2 per), however, at least one member showed up to share their video to the rest of the class.

These were their first videos of the class and for some of them these were the first videos ever. Given that, they did pretty well.

For dinner, we eat leftover mashed beans, helpings from the never-ending ricepot, and salad. After dinner, we try frying a regular banana for fun, then make a banana pancake and cook that hotcake. We also do potatoes vs. sweet yams in the form of fries. And we eat all that.

Too much grease, says Adam´s stomach. Brooke´s is made of solid titanium so she feels little more than a ping here and a pang there.


5 August 2009, Wednesday

Today we separated into traditional man and woman roles. If you know me, then you know how this might have played out in my head. Imagine ten years from now a stay-at-home-Brooke. It's not pretty. In any case, I have a load of appreciation for all men and women who are able to keep their wits and happiness about them even when the fruits of their labor are housework and cooking. This morning, we cooked from 8 am until noon. We made fruit salad in the morning from papaya, strawberries, apples, and bananas topped with lúcuma yogurt and molasses. We also started boiling purple corn over the campfire in the back of the house so that we could make “purple mass.” aka mazamora.

Adam skipped the morning exercise to be one small component of a 400 meter water tube. At 6:40am he helped load up a pedal powered cart that has a rectangular carrying area of approximately 2 meters by 1 meter and a railing in the Z direction (out of the ground) about a foot high. 6 buckets, 2 jerry cans, and 1 50 gallon drum went on their. Empty. To the watering hole which happened to be going today. The mission is to bring enough water for the construction project that is going on on our host´s daughter´s land. The daughter is a nun in Chile and the nunnery is apparently financing the construction of a brick and concrete home on her land but for her mother to live in since her current home has cracked corners.

The tube of water ended up performing efficiently enough for a couple hours. 3 trips and the construction site´s speaker declared us free to help him build columns. Juan stuck up for our stomachs and let him know we had yet to breakfast. And breakfast was delicious (see first paragraph of this entry). Then we headed back out to work on the columns. With only four people working, only of two of which have extensive experience in construction, work goes quite slowly. Four column molds are being set and corners of brick are being laid. From then till 3:30pm the site is a paced effort to put watery concrete down makeshift molds. The workers claim to have a decent amount of ethic and dedication to the structural engineering specs that are given, but also say they have the plans memorized and don´t need to look column sizes up. Interesting, considering there is over 20 columns – but maybe they are all the same.

Adam mixes concrete for a good while, picks nails out of boards transports sand, gravel and cement from their dispersed location. Water had been brought in earlier by some very nice people, so we doused the water cement ratio like as if these guys had never taken 1.035. Adam made a valiant effort at discussing how the water cement ratio governs the strength of the concrete and they laughed saying the water was no matter and to keep putting more in since it made it easier to pour. The water does seep out through the slits between the boards of the column boards, so maybe not that big of a deal – minus the cement that is carried out with the water.

At around 4pm, Adam regroups with Brooke to help Yubi, one of our younger students, critique her video and do some basic stitching of clips. Her video is based on a true story of thieves being buried alive in Señor de Luren. Interesting, but she could have been more creative with the angle her shots took.

From there we discuss how to improve our encuestas. We decide to at least get some surveys done to find out what percentage of people have heard of our class. As expected, few have, except for those who live near the schoolhouse or are really good friends with a current student. And then we head off to pay another visit to the internet spot where Adam left his USB. Still no luck, but they say come back tomorrow morning and we might be able to hook you up.

Cool. Adam heads home to join the rest for dinner.. Heated up Estufado de Pollo con arroz, quaker and té de cocoa, mazamora for desert, and life is.


4 August 2009, Tuesday

This morning we ran through the farms. Rows and rows, squares next to squares, and water running through it. There was a line of workers shooting straight as an arrow through one of the green patches that we passed, hunched over the land. We stopped in at a soccer field for a couple of sprints. We raced each other home (surprise, who won?), and stopped in at breakfast for some delicious leftovers from yesterday's lunch.

Afterwards we split up. One into Ica for a meeting with MCLCP to obtain statistics about the town, and another to stay at home, help cook lunch, look after Ariana, and clean the dishes. Possibly write up the worksheets for Thursday if family life ceased to buzz in their ear.

On the homefront, there was much playing with Ariana at the park. To get out of the way of the drinking Señor Lopez who was chopping apart the front of the house for some strange maintenance reasoning, we whisked ourselves away to the land of swingsets and slides. We met up with the some kids who were in the middle of the tutoring that happens in the Casita on every weekday during the morning and sometimes in the afternoon. There were three kids inside who were reading and doing puzzles together. Apparently, an Aportes truck had been spotted earlier so maybe there was more adult help present before I arrived.

Afterwards, I helped cook lunch while our abuelita worried herself to a tremor. She had been running around the entire time to prepare refreshments for Señor Lopez, take care of getting lunch ready for hungry, working men, and also fussing over the cleanliness of the house. She sat down in the kitchen and gave us orders which were followed dutifully as one reads a very important book. Line by line, syllable by syllable.

Beans. Rice. Potatoes. Onions. Garlic. Tomatoes. All mixed together to make guiso de pollo. So delicious. After the women had finished eating in the kitchen and cleaning the dishes, we set out to test our communication survey. It is concerned with how the community talks amongst themselves. What formal organization exists? And how does word spread throughout the neighborhood? The answers we get here are particularly mundane, but I'm not entirely sure what we were expecting. News travels by mouth. There are three organizations here as far as we know. Junta Directiva to which we've already been introduced, Vaso de Leche which is government funded, and a grupo de mujeres.Our grandma doesn't really care too much about local news, let alone international news.

Later, I went to check on one of our students who hadn't shown up in awhile. Then we met back to up to do some debriefing and to have lunch. Adam has managed to get some leads on where we can get more information about our small village. He also managed to shoot out some e-mails and bike around in the open fresh air for a few hours. Thankfully he returned with strawberries, water, and contact solution. Then we split up again into our traditional roles of man and woman. Adam left to go work on a construction site. I was on my way to go grab some quaker and tea from the local tienda when I came across a really-big-smile-inducing-sight: our students with props and cameras filming their movies. They had made paper wings for one story. Found fake guns for the story about robbers. They had their storyboards out and ready to consult and were doing takes one by one. I even got the honor of being in one of the movies! During the recording, we found out just how difficult it is to record on the streets without a stage or sound equipment. The music next door was blaring, neighbor's were cheering around a cock fight, and later there was an accidental dog fight that resulted in a dead puppy. It's hard to tear two dogs apart when one is set on ripping out the other's jugular.

In Ica, Adam spent the day shooting the breeze with friends from the university of Ica and French architects who had taken the day off to experimentally mix a couple outlandish Peruvian varietes of local alcohol. There was mazamora alcohol, banana alcohol, lúcuma wine, and best of all agarrobina liquor made from the famous amazonian tree sap. Oh, and did I mention the Argentinian steaks we had imported for the event?

En serio, Adam´s first stop was the internet café in La Tinguiña where Adam had absentmindedly left a USB drive with some decently important info on it. It was not there and they had seen nothing of it. Damn Adam´s mind full of thoughts much more important than some silly USB. Time we got us a new partner. They say the people who came in after us were mostly kids from the neighborhood who are regulars, and they will see what detective work they can pull off with no more than real-life training.

Next stop is Mesa de Concertación de la Lucha Contra la Pobreza (MCLCP). None of the know-it-alls are there, just the secretary, but she´s decently helpful with ideas of who to talk to. Also happened to be a freelance engineering consultant stop by who was in the middle of evaluating a project for a retaining wall in Caserío Manco Cápac where we are living. Funny story when she shows Adam the pictures of the planned site, and he laughs. The town is asking for a retaining wall to be built in a small canal with water from the Achiranah river that happens to be located right outside our schoolhouse. Adam has some fun explaining why he thinks the retaining wall makes no sense since the canal is so small and would be little left, but maybe a bit of concrete to simply make the canal a bit more permanent might make sense. We talk some engineering, some mix proportions and after a few bottles of agarrobina liquor we exchange emails and split off our seperate ways.

Adam heads to Defensa Civil, or the INDECI, office. The director isn´t there till tomorrow. Ok, see you then. Off to Aportes, know one there either. PNUD? Neither. Watch? 1pm. Ahhh...almuerzo, everyone around here goes out to eat for lunch for a couple hours
So Adam opts for the internet. The one hour variety turns into an hour and a half marathon. Many emails are sent, many translated from english to spanish and vice versa. We are solicitiing help and ideas for our research project from more knowledgeable ones at MIT and UNICA, thanking many contacts down here for helping us choose our community, inviting these contacts to our final video screening event on a date that is not yet known exactly, and asking select awesome people if they would be interested in being guest speakers at upcoming classes with the kids.

From there Adam heads over to Aportes to hang out with Yngrid for awhile. She flutters around and lands on a folder of word docs that she think might apply to the research they have already done on Señor de Luren. She doesn´t find much but tells us she will let us know when she talks to the engineers in the office who have kept track of that side of work a bit more. Hernán tells Adam that he will be around within 15 mins so Adam go wait for him at the UN office. He doesn´t show up for 30 mins so Adam gives him a call again. 15 more mins he says. Aight, let´s talk tomorrow buddy. He´s hungry. And its 3pm. And back home there is def some delicious homemade segundo with a tasty sopa. On the way out he picks up fresas and water. Sunglasses, mochila, bike – check. Heads home.

We also chatted with Jhimmy and Gloria about Viña Tacama, NGOs, and working in the farms one day. They sort of laughed at the idea that we would talk to the owner of the Viña, but said they liked our spirit of adventure and would be into setting us up with an initial meeting. Jhimmy actually has a more posh/skilled job in the winery as opposed to working in the farms, so he is our in.

After dinner, we all passed out. Man, it's tiring to be a Peruvian.


3 August 2009, Monday

We promised to be at the park by 6:45. But we weren't. We were late. The morning was too cold, and our eyes were too heavy from sleep. When I was younger, my grandma used to tell me stories about a sand man who would make rounds like Santa Claus from house to house. His job was to sprinkle sand on all the little children's eyes so that they could go to bed. That doesn't sound so pleasant now, as our eyes suffer from chronic sand-itis. It's what you get when you live in a desert and bike around. But in the end, we went running. Just 15 minutes late. Each day we eliminate a new direction, run on a new street, and find new places. My legs are tiring a little bit each day... less muscle, less energy. This is the first time either of us have run consecutively for more than 3 days in a long time, if ever. No one is complaining though, believe me.

We hit up the direction toward the mountains, where El Molino is rumored to be. The morning is misty, like running through clouds. There are tractors and trucks and people hustling through the streets, each at their own perspective speeds. It's a little abnormal to see so much activity this early. We've seen people in fields at this time of morning or waiting on the sides of roads on their way to work, but nothing so complicated as this dance. Then we remember what Juan told us yesterday (Just a reminder to those keeping track, Juan is our adopted family brother. Important character, take note), “There is going to be a big harvest tomorrow morning. People are going to be taking up all the good stuff.” In my head that is what he said because he was speaking Spanish, and Adam was too busy to translate that one for me.

We slipped past the mountain, onto the other side to gaze upon the enigmatic cross at its crest. We hope to someday conquer its slope when we don't have anything on the agenda. We've been told that there is a procession to the top during the fiesta of the crosses every year. After returning to the other side of the spiny purple majesties, we throw down the usual exercises at the playground with some muscles that Adam likes to list off rapidly that I never cared to learn in anatomy class. I try to stick to the basics like sit ups and push ups. Then I g... Woah!! Where is Pirata? Our furry friend didn't accompany us on this grand adventure because he was happily occupied with Juan in the fields all day. Weird.

When I snap out of my endorphin high, Adam is suddenly frying onions up with some tomatoes and ... apples? He smiles proudly of his unique peruvian cooking accomplishment. Unfortunately no one at the table is brave enough to try his concoction except for me. It was delicious. Since Juan and Edwin are at work, it is just us, Marcy the grandma, and little Ariana who has just woken up from her beauty slumber.

Although we attempted our hand at brainstorming and planning for the day, we were pleasantly interrupted by our family going out on a walk to the local big tienda. Ariana looked more like she wanted to play than walk, so we offered to take some Soles to the store for them ad return with milk and honey. 1 kilo onions. 1 kilo tomatoes. 5 soles of chicken meat thing stuff. Two stores later, and a heartbeat early, we return with all of that plus a little bag of laundry detergent that has the smell of “baby.” Apparently, it's good. Or so we're told.

I hit up the cooking duties with Edwin while Adam does laundry. I am slow at peeling potatoes, and there are a lot of clothes to be washed. By the time we've finished, we're basically new people. I cook over a wood burning stove for the first time, peel a chicken of its skin, and manage to do it all without running water. The result is pollo saltado (sautéed onions, tomatoes, and chicken in a spicy sauce mixed together with big fat home-made french fries with a side of rice). Of course, there is also soup to start off our lunching. And by the time we're finished, it's basically 3pm. We all stare at the clock on the wall with astonishment for approximately 30 minutes, when we leave for our errands.

Being a bike again is like finding new legs. Like putting on a fresh pair. Only, the rain and weather has maltreated my poor bicicleta. I guess that's called negligence on my part. Let's blame the elements. First, we talk with the mama of Gloria. She is sitting pretty with Alison, chatting, so we decide to barge in and demand where their neighbor Julie is (say that yoo-lee). She happens to be a close contact who also works at the municipality where we hope to get maps of our new neighborhood. She isn't there, but grandmama Gloria calls her up. Then we hit up Pamela, who is no where to be found. Then The one person in our class that hasn't shown up since day one just check on her. 9 out of 10 sticking around isn't a bad persuasion rate. I give us A minuses.

Off to Tinguiña. Along the way we see something that appears to be a wedding. Many cars and a few people gathered around. Run our tires through some cement, watch some dogs copulate, run into Julie who gives us these maps that weren't as detailed as we imagined they'd be, and hit up an Internet cafe to send some e-mails for some consultation about our project and how to make sure we come back with all the right stuff. I am sitting on a log outside the house, along the drybed river where the community's trash goes. There are a lot of little flies and bothersome bugs that keep landing on me. What's more is that my environmental alarms are going off like nuts thinking about how this place never has a chance of clean water unless everyone here and upstream goes on a spring cleaning frenzy to take all the trash out. Even though, I don't know what sort of money and organization it would even possible take to get the trash from here to somewhere it could be treated. I guess you just have to think that this trash is going to soak through the water, into the soil, into the plants, and back into our mouths. A circle of life.

Upon our return, we are served two things. One is dinner. The other is news that the wedding we saw was actually a funeral. Oops.

What kind of communication happens here? How is the information about our class travelling? How much do these people really care about what's happening in their neighborhood or elsewhere in the world? How did our abuelita find out about something so far away so quickly? Who do they spend their time with? How far from the house do they typically venture out? As far as Nazca (two hours in bus) to their rented land. As far as Cañete to sell their daughter's land. As far as Ica to buy food for dinner, lunch, and breakfast? Outside their door to cut wood, nada más?

So we make up a survey to ask our family first and then would like to venture out to question throughout the streets. Until then, I think we will watch man on wire until the computer quits doing its job.