DOCU - MOTO : Manco Cápac, La Tinguiña, Peru (documentary terremoto)

Day 3

2010-08-03T16:21:00.001-07:00

Hello!

Here are a few pictures of the third day of our trip where we had a nice tour in the morning, a miscommunication in the afternoon, an evening of trying to communicate, and a night of rejoicing due to the resolution of aforementioned miscommunication. Here are some pictures. That night, everyone conversed about the difficulties of community service ITSª.

Roxana, a guide that we hope to take on the job of giving tours, is showing the nursery to the alumni. She is explaining the process of insertions for the plants. Below is a picture of a grafted plant which is used to propogate good plant genes. Ok, I don´t know much about the topic, but you can see pictures of the process at the bottom of this web page

Here are some bags that are ready to receive the sorted cacao beans. There are the BIG beans, mediums, smalls, and things that aren´t really beans.

Here we are in our new hotel, along the river with a beautiful view..

And tarantulas in the rooms. Haha. We moved hotels to get away from the large insects and here we are with spiders the size of your palms (and bigger) next to our beds. PS Alison totally got a baby tarantula in her skirt. It was amazing. She lived.

Eberhard, Shahla, and Alison (with her spider skirt) looking over the view of the hotel.

Yutzos was a great place to hang out. Which was lucky since Adam, Brooke, and Anna ran through the streets of Tena trying to find a taxi to take them to a meeting with Carlos. We found one, had our meeting, cleared up our miscommunications (is there a tour.. not a tour? Why did all the Kichwa go in another truck and not with us, PS what´s the dealio?), and the returned to a bunch of patient alumni. They were all worrying about the delicate and new relationship between MIT and Kallari that had just been cultivated.

It turns out Kallari thought our tourism bus driver was racist, Brooke misunderstood that the canoe ride was three hours, and based off of the lack of clear conversations, Kallari did not have the chance to finish their tour.

Which reminds me a lot about the themes of the Peruvian half of our trip.

Here we are in Manco Cápac and Señor de Luren, trying to complete our documentary. We have a mere ten days left in our trip, and themes of post-disaster communication are swirling through our heads. We are trying to send a message to communities and reconstruction NGOs with our movie while involving the community in taking shots, making editing choices, and shaping the voice of the documentary.

It´s been a very long process. We just showed the community our second draft documentary outside of a community store located between the two little pueblos. We started late, it got cold, and a lot of people ended up leaving. We can´t be sure why. It seemed that they all enjoyed seeing their community on a big screen, their harvests being made more ¨hollywood,¨ and even calling out the names of their neighbors.

But communication isn´t easy.

We stressed six themes in our documentary, topics that I think applied strongly to a lot of the work that we did in Ecuador.

1. Trust between NGOs and communities so that NGOs understand the true needs of the people while also creating moments of exchange of imformation so that the relationship is two-ways

2. Sustainability through investment by the community that is beyond just participation.

3. Clear, honest, and transparent communication that informs communities of how and why decisions are being made.

4. Passionate leadership from the NGO that expresses determination and dedication. Someone who applies the talents and skills of their volunteers in a way that meets their community´s short and long-term needs.

5. Collaboration between NGOs, and government (as well as with communities) to ensure that work is being done in a consistent, high-quality manner with even distributions of aid.

6. Channels for communication that are accessible by communities to express their needs, concerns, and questions to the NGO.

Of course these things aren´t easy. And we´re finding out even more difficulties about this work as we continue editing our documentary.... but more later.

Day 2

2010-08-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

With their noses to the grindstone, the alumni started working their tail-ends off on day two. We had the entire day to meet with stakeholders, eat lunch with the community, and finally get our feet wet.

The workshop was a smash success:

We arrived with little time to spare but few from the community beat us there. Robin, Deanna, Kathryn, and Alison helped set up the corn sheller while Brooke, Vikki, Shahla and Anna planned for the nutrition workshop.

Robin said kids are awesome and corn shellers are cool, but she doesn´t know a thing about them and spanish speakers should be doing the bulk talking. So we did. Robin squat down next to the community members and communicated the best she could. Hammers were swinging and the hands did the talking. Below you can see

Here, all the women are trying out the new cornshellers that they´ve made.

Here you can see the de-kerneling happening before your eyes.

The turn out seemed small at first but then as the day progressed, the corn sheller materials got snatched up. In particular, a corn sheller designed in another part of the world was much clamored after. ¨I have a cousin who is a metal worker. I´d like to show this to him so he can make more, better.¨ It was the highlight of Alison´s trip, I think. Then the nutrition workshop with professor Shahla in the picture below. She gave everyone a quick talk about balanced meals and opened up the floor for whatever questions the community had concerning nutrition. There were questions about salt, what kid´s should eat, etc. And Shahla fielded them all expertly. And in the end it turned out to be just right because all the food was gone and everyone ate contentedly.

Deanna(left) fled the scene to work with Judy (right) and Elias (middle) concerning the promotional brochures. A nice twist of a career spun her from mechanical engineer, systems thinker to designer. She´s talented. Like seriously. They talked about the details and the technicalities of the cooperative and chocolate-making process. The results have been good so far, but just you wait in September when things really get rolling. The post-trip relationship that has resulted has yet to fully bud, but I expect full bloom once emails begin to fly.

Erika, Joe, Dick, and Roberta headed straight for the office and hung up a big piece of paper and began mapping out the business of Kallari. After a meeting with Carlos and Leonor, they were able to really start revving their planning engines. Then they spoke with Judy to get finer details about the cooperative (time that Carlos just didn´t have) and the markets in the United States.

Then the alumni split up. Some began to clean up the workshop space while the Tourism Planning group went on a short tour with Kallari to meet some farmers and havea jolly time in the Rainforest amongst all the cacao plants.

Here, you can see that Nick from Global Adrenaline has fancied himself a tree-climbing device and harvested a yucca root. The smile says everything.

Here, Anna tries it out. Looks more like she´s brute forcing up that tree, but you can see the fibers around her feet!

And finally, our community tour guide.

The day was full, and we retired to our Cabañas in the deep woods with the large insects and abundance of tarantulas in the bathrooms. And when we arrived, we laughed and drank some wine. And the night passed pleasantly.

Except for Roberta who had ¨friendly baby monkeys playing on her roof.¨ Well, they were bats actually.

Day 1 (in Tena, that is!)

2010-08-03T15:26:00.000-07:00

A brief summary:
1. Factory tour
2. Four hour drive from the mountainous Quito to deep jungle depths of Tena
3. Our first official orientation with Kallari
4. Dinner follwed sleeping the night away in the eco-lodge Cabañas Aliñahui

But how it really happened is a whole other story. Where we last left off, the alumni had just arrived and taken a brief 2-day orientation throughout Quito, learning how to work with communities with the Pachamama Foundation and understanding the tail end of Kallari´s chain of production (cafe and factory). Although we don´t have any pictures, we promise we saw how chocolate was made. Through the entire process from toasting to conching, until the temperature is made just right and each package is sealed by hand.

On a tight schedule to get to Tena by 3pm, we hopped back on the bus. Brooke was breaking out in stress hives, contemplating the intricate consequences of missing the integral meeting with the Board of Directors. Just that morning, the route had been blocked due to massive landslides. How would we pass? Would the road be under construction? Once we started, there was no looking back. Anna reassured her that everything would be okay. Anna is almost always right, too, so Brooke believed her.

Meanwhile, Adam was in Tena sipping on a pina colada. Work had slipped through his fingers and time was abundant. Or so he says.

In the last blog post, you see our journey. We rushed and ran and turned and swerved all the way there. By the time we arrived, our stomachs were in our feet. Judy Logback and Raquel both narrated our path. I don´t think any one will remember every single river, but that´s ok!

(insert story about finding the infamous corn sheller, a tale only to be heard in person)

We arrived though.. thirty minutes early for our orientation. Brooke fainted and Adam took it from there:

Here, you can see how organized our orientation was. Adam had set up name tags, printed relevant documents, and provided the groups with handy notebooks to take down useful information. The Kallari office accompanied each project group accordingly. We had Judy working on promotion materials. Fabricio was working with the Community Workshop Group, naming all the food he could possibly think of. Leonor and Carlos were swept off their feet to work with Growth Planning... and by the end of it, everyone´s heads were spinning.

The most important part, though, is that the alumni worked with the community parter, one-on-one. And Brooke was happy. Adam was happy. And Anna was ecstatic because the rainforest is like her favorite place ever. Period.

Carlos gave a kind welcoming speech to the alumni. He said that everyone thinks that the Cooperative is crazy, but they dreamed their dream and here they are earning more money for their farmers. There was a small part inside of me that stood and applauded when he said, ¨Welcome to Kallari´s house. We are glad you are here.¨ As students preparing for the trip, the moment could not have been any more rewarding.
During our orientation, Robin Millman learned how to make a cornsheller for the first time. As an educator, she was charged with working with the community face-to-face to help them learn more about design and creativity. As a non-native speaker, however, Robin insisted that Adam run the workshop. Here, you can see her doing a fab job at putting together a cornsheller. An impromptu workshop was called as the Kallari technicians showed up on the scene, and Fabricio started pounding away. It was a preview of what was to come tomorrow at 8:30 am when we started the real thing! I´ll give you a sneak preview though.. Robin and Shahla rocked their community interactions and made everyone feel at home. Big kudos to their open ears and hearts. You think that´s cheesy? Just you wait!
After a long three hours of saying hello to Kallari, we trekked our way south for 40 more minutes to the Cabañas. The place is a solar-panel run with rainwater harvesting sort of hostal. It serves dinner, breakfast, and packs lunch in beautiful banana leaves to cut down on its environmental impact. The lodge is 1.2 km from the main road, inside the jungle, alongside the Rio Napo. Here is the view.

When we arrived, however, the hostel was not like the hostel we saw on the internet...

-Intermission-

2010-08-03T15:09:00.001-07:00

Hello all,
Apologies for the hiatus, but a thundering herd of alumni, coordinators, and travel guides charged through the last ten days of our lives.

Anna remains in Ecaudor to tie off the rest of the loose ends while Brooke and Adam travel another 48 hours from the jungle back to the dessert. The community is far from internet connection, but they will make valiant stabs to blog as best they can.

To tide you over until we are able to blog in detail again, here are some photos of the beautiful scenery between Quito and Tena:

Getchya ´self oriented

2010-07-28T20:34:00.000-07:00

If you want pictures, scroll down. You want information? Let's talk.

My grandma is always the first one to read our blog. No joke. She sent me an e-mail today and said, "Good post, but a little scattered." And so per her request, we´re gonna do a run down:

Alumni? I thought it was you two students doing service in Ecuador...
Who´s Anna?
Corn-what?
When did this all happen?
!!!

Adam and I have been spending the last month figuring out the detailed schedules of 9 lucky alumni who dedicated this week to service through the Alumni Association and the Public Service Center. We have chosen Ecuador due to heavy D-Lab involvement (among many other reasons). A particular reason was La Anna.

Anna Waldman-Brown is a physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This will be her third time to Ecuador. Last January, she was here to scout out possible partners and to build up relationships between Ecuadorian organizations and MIT. That´s where Adam I entered.

In our month of work here before the alumni arrived, we attempted to make matches between the skills of our Alumni with the needs of Kallari. It is an incredible opportunity to expose the Alumni to the complexities of international development and partnerships, which they might not have had during their time at MIT. In the words of one alum (more or less), "in my day, there was not an interest in public service. My parents did not have a stable job during the Depression, and it was instilled in me that I needed a career. We all worked for companies and didn't have the chance to really engage with the international community like you students do."

Now Anna, Adam, and I are working as a trio to coordinate the trip's service focus.

We arrived at four different project groups. Each group will develop at its own rate, brainstorm, and come up with individual deliverables. We are excited to get some professionals working alongside Kallari.

In the IT team, we have Eberhard Wunderlich who has over 20 years (humor me, I´m recalling from memory, and so it may be more) with AT&T. Vikki Auzenne at the University of Minnesota who is building an IT start-up from the ground up (and taking classes on the side, mind you!) To design an appropriate Information Technology system to fit Kallari´s current needs with recommendations for the future. If feasible this team will also look into improving the Kallari website.

The "Growth for Planning Team" is powerhoused by Roberta Pittore, a professor at the Sloan School of Management. Her specialty is negotiation which is complemented by Erika William's experience in Silicon Valley. Erika has a myriad of skills, and her particular strength in this arena is her work with small companies in growing bigger. They will be advising Kallari on possible obstacles to be expected in the future as well as mapping out preventative actions to ensure a smooth transition into the expected rapid expansion.

The "Marketing and Tourism Group" is charged with two separate and integrated goals. (1) To design and draft print a non-technical brochure, in many languages, that includes the history and goals of Kallari. This brochure will be used for general promotion during presentations and other events. (2) To research, critique, and recommend how to realistically begin Kalalri´s tourism branch as soon as possible. The team will experience many trial tours to better understand details and logistics. They've got a dynamic mixture of Richard Millman, an aerospace defense company CEO for the past few decades, Joe Levitch, PSC Leadership Council Member and human resource consultant, and Deanna Griffith, designer by day and mechanical engineerg by night!

The Community Workshop group is blessed with the sweet and feisty Robin Millman who is a life-long teacher infused with passion and endearing nutritionist, Shahla Wunderlich. They will promote better nutrition and appropriate corn shelling technologies in a hands-on workshop with representatives from Kallari communities.

Right, so... onto the pictures.

The alumni climb off the bus to go on a contextualizing, educational tour

A street in Old Quito during our town tour.

Architecture! "Some church facade. I can't remember." The alumni are really absorbing.

Our first lunch together at the Choza (the shack) where projects were passed out and the chaos exploded.

Our presentation at the Ministry of Agriculture with Engineer Juan Carlos Barrazueta was about the cacao of Ecuador in the global perspective.

A piece of art by Ecuador's most famous painter, Oswaldo Guayasamín, who painted the emotion and story of his fellow indigeous. Read more here.

After a fabulous jungle native lunch of tilapia, yucca, and plantain soup, we took a picture with the Kallari staff members. Later we split up into groups. One went to Pachamama to have an exchange of ideas and the other stayed to work with the cafe's IT and design needs.

Oh, and here's Kathryn and some kids on the streets shining her shoes. After this photo was taken, the price was raised by double.

To wrap this up... in a short sentence: There's more than meets the eye. I wish I could write more, but the night is old! More explanations to come later and later and later.

The Alums Arrive

2010-07-28T00:07:00.000-07:00

Hey from Quito!

All of the alumni arrived yesterday, and as you can see in the picture below, Anna's all decked out in her MIT gear for the welcoming. Yes, she is indeed wearing three name tags.

While we are in Quito, we are working towards preparing ourselves with the background knowledge and skills needed for when we travel to Tena. This means getting familiar with the context of Ecuador, learning more about our community service partner Kallari, and most importantly, learning each other's names. One of the things we are most excited about is the technology transfer of the corn sheller (pictured at the bottom of the blog on alovely ghanian skirt that Anna brought here!) We have been preparing for a community workshop for the 21 indigenous farming areas in which Kallari works. We plan to do some creative capacity building with a fun ice breaker, teaching about the corn sheller and its function, some critical thinking sessions about how to improve the sheller, a nutritional stint, and then a nice LUNCH!

Wait a minute, hold your breath. What?! That's a ton of stuff to fit into one day. And believe me, some of the alumni have been feeling the overwhelming rush as the ol' MIT firehose comes shooting back with loads of seemingly contextless information (thank you to Joe Levitch for throwing the MIT terminology out there). Remember that feeling? Course ya do.

So tomorrow, we will be focusing on giving everyone more direction, understanding how it all fits together, and how we can really focus on service to make a lasting difference.

The better question is.. how lasting can the difference be if our experts will only be here for a week?

Stay tuned....

It rained very hard last night.

2010-07-16T08:17:00.000-07:00

What a cool parrot!!!

Dear readers,

Yesterday was the best day of eating, ever. Let me explain... We recently moved to another hostel that is off the beaten road and a bit further in the jungle. No one is around to cook us meals anymore like Vilma would do every morning, lunch, and dinner so we have to do it ourselves now.

Yesterday morning, we had a great omelet with tea sort of morning, and as we started to clean up, a parrot poked its head through the kitchen window. Window is a relative term since there are barely walls to begin with, just a few pieces of bamboo and what have you. The parrot was pretty cool, since we had only ever seen him from afar. His name is Roger.

It carefully entered the window and proceeded to poke its way down the side of a cabinet, using its beak as a hand while gripping tightly with his feet. It got a bit closer and you could see all the parts of its feathers and its little eyes searching the room ...

FOR MEAT.

That´s right. Roger zeroed in on Adam´s foot and charged. Luckily, Adam dodged the attack, and I managed to jump out of Roger´s second launch. I stood on a chair while Adam grabbed a stool to fend the crazy bird off. Down, Roger, down! But this thing was relentless. It finally caught hold of Adam´s shoe and began to nibble bits off. I could only imagine that those black pieces of rubber could have been fleshy nibs of Adam´s foot, and I was glad that Roger´s crazed taste buds couldn´t tell the difference. Shoeless, Adam backed away and called for the owner of the hostel. I stared at Roger from on top of the stool, and Adam strategically edged towards the door.

Finally, Señor Mazon came over to calm Roger down, and give him a piece of corn. Later that night, we had a run in with another animal, much less fierce though. Ants, marching across a bridge with pieces of leaves.

The morning after, all that remained were the leaves. A trail as if the ants had all just decided to abandon work. I think the rain must have swept them away. Before you stop reading, just take one more look at Roger´s eyes in that top picture. Not so cool anymore, huh? Just ... hungry.

STEP 1.5 in "bean to bar": Dia de Compras

2010-07-10T16:38:00.000-07:00

We forgot a step from our last post: step 1.5, which is to go around to every farm and collect the cacao from each farmer.

(1) Farm

(1.5) Buying Day and Collection

(2) Collection and Drying Center

(3) Chocolate Factory

(4) Kallari Cafe

Oops, but here it is now!

At 6:30 am, we need to be at the Collection and Drying Center.

"Make sure to bring money for lunch, water for the day, and your patience. Tomorrow we'll be traveling to Kallari's communities and making cacao purchases from the farmers."

At 6:00am, I was still shoveling food into my mouth. Egg sandwich, yogurt, and whatever else I could manage to gulp while simultaneously trying to keep my eyes open. Here is the Centro de Acopios at 6:28:46, when we arrived:

We tried to entertain ourselves while we waited (not too hard, since we already crack each other up without trying) and one of the results was this picture:

ME, holding my favorite rock! Looks crazed, huh? It's 6:30 in the morning, what can you expect? (Hey Grandma Judy! It was like the worry stone from Ireland you gave me. A nice little stone bump to rub. PS I still have that!).

About 30 minutes later, Miguel, a quiet Kichwa farmer strolled up the hill at a leisurely pace. We all said good morning and sat quietly, enjoying the sounds around us. A taxi roared up the hill with Jorge in tow. As he got out of the taxi, he laughed. His eyes looked relieved, "And I was in such a hurry!" A few minutes later, Miguel picked up a grasshopper by its leg from the fence. We watched it breath and flutter.

Finally Juan arrived with the keys, and we took off in a taxi at 8:00 am. Lady Gaga's Bad Romance played loud and proud as we cut through the city streets of Tena. The taxista knew the neighborhood and his car well. It wasn't long before my head was bobbing up and down across the rough gravel roads, and rocks were flying into the underbody of the pick-up. This is one of the bridges we crossed over as we rushed towards the community. Steel bridge knowledge in tow, Adam reassured me that it would not fall down as we drove over it. But I was still scared..

The truck had 4 blue barrels, a tripod to hold the scale, a taxi driver, and 5 passengers (one of which had a wad of cash to buy cacao). We travelled from 8am until 1pm from the Centro de Acopios to Punibocana to Altoposuno and back to the Centro de Acopios. Both of these communities are on the community map that was posted on the ecoalum site, can you find them? We are thinking of returning to Punibocana for some community workshops... here is the view:

(Altoposuno above)

(Punibocana above)

Cacao can grow in the forest without perfect rows of trees or extensive fertilizer or even insecticide. If you have enough patience and dedication (or time!) to brush fungus and ants off new budding flowers that will later be mazorcas, the red pods will dot the lush greenery on their own. Around the corner from the last picture in Punibocana...

We were doing business. Don't you wish this was your office?

Here, you can see Jorge communicating with the cacao farmers about prices and procedures. As Byron directed us through the maze of gravel roads, I hung my head out the window like a dog hungry for sunshine. Why would any one want to live anywhere else? Turns out, the houses in Altoposuno and Punibocana are on stilts for tigers. Other houses that are close to rivers use them to avoid flood damage. I slapped a mosquito on my leg, and realized that paradise may never be found. But as Adam recently pointed out, there's just about everything here: tiger meat, water, sun, farms of every kind, lush vegetation... and a whole ton of bugs.

In the first community, Punibocana, Byron greeted farmers with small talk about the harvest or follow up with business from the last collection while Adam and Miguel set up the scale. Jorge shuffled through his papers and ran his finger down the list that tells which farmer is organic and which isn't. Byron says that they already know everyone, but they check just in case.

Benoit, the student doing research on organic certification and the rainforest alliance stamp of approval, says that most cacao farmers "grow their crops organically by default. They can't afford fertilizer in the first place."

Alex, another student doing complementary research told us that "the certification is something that seems to be mostly for advertising purposes. The farmers don't understand what it means or why it is important. But people abroad are willing to pay for it."

Vilma's husband, Raul, says that Kallari is being fooled by farmers who say they are organic but use chemicals at key points during the cacao tree's life. Vilma chimed in and said that other farmers sell to the intermediaries behind Kallari's back... with the harvest from cacao trees that Kallari donated! Traitors, they said... but, back to the cacoa...

First, it is weighed.

This is noted. Kallari pays 40 cents per pound that is non-organic and 50 cents per pound for organically grown cacao.

The farmer signs in acknowledgment.

And is paid accordingly.

Passing up the cacao

Pouring it in the bins

And all of it mixed in, yummy!

We collected an astoundingly low amount of cacao this trip. But given that it is the end of the harvesting season, it makes a lot of sense. The farmers from Punibocana gave us most of their last harvests. In total, there was probably a little under 500 pounds.

After driving 40 minutes out to Altopusuno, we were welcomed by dead silence. No one was around besides a man and his horse. They informed us that everyone had brought their last rounds last week so we stretched our legs and congratulated one another for a job well done. In the past, collection days have taken up to 12 or 19 hours. We were done in a clean 4.

Back in the Centro de Acopios, we pour the wet cacao seeds into the fermentation bins.

Within these three levels, the cacao are left to ferment. We put the wet pepas in the top third row where temperatures are monitored and stirred meticulously. The technician knows when and how to push the seeds into the second row, and finally the bottom row for a perfect process.

Here you see our work in a wooden box, and a solar drying bed in the upper right-hand corner. The clever design let's gravity do most of the work since the seeds are pushed straight into the drying bed from the bottom row as soon as fermentation is done.

Good night and farewell!

Bean to Bar, har har

2010-07-08T19:41:00.000-07:00

Our first days here were like cramming for an exam. Pens poised and scribbling furiously about all the different steps it takes to get cacao from seed to chocolate: sewing, tending, growing, harvesting, drying, sorting, vending, and finally the factory.

We would like to discover as much as possible about the cooperative. This way our efforts can be pointed, well-planned, and most importantly, truly helpful. So we had to ask: What are your dreams, successes, difficulties, and failures? It all starts here with these mazorcas of cacao. Although some people might translate the word cacao to cocoa when speaking in english, others are more picky about their chocolate vocabulary. There is a difference!

To understand it all as efficiently as possible, we met with Kallari's board of directors. If the farmers are the cogs that keep this cooperative turning then Carlos, Elias, Fabricio, and Leonor are the grease. Just this past January, representatives from the 21 associations elected these four to coordinate Kallari's efforts towards its mission:

“We are a community association of the Ecuadorian Amazon that practices sustainable agriculture to produce, process, and commercialize, at national and international levels, organic as well as artesinal products with a cultural identity; these practices are based in respect, equality, participation, and for the benefit our communities.

Additionally, we visited and experienced every step that the cacao goes through to get from farm to chocolate:

(1) Farm

(2) Collection Center

(3) Factory

(4) Cafe Kallari and other distribution routes

Today, we'll talk about our experiences in the farm and collection center. The next blog post will be about the factory (sorry, no pictures were allowed!) and Cafe Kallari in Quito, Ecuador.

(1) FARM

That's a cacao pod, the main ingredient for Kallari's famous single-source organic chocolate. And as it stands now, the Kallari cooperative's main focus is the cacao market.

We visited a 5 hectare farm owned by Don Cesar. The farm is Rainforest Alliance and Organic certified so the cacao trees grow alongside other native trees, plants, and animals of the Amazon. You can read more about the Rainforest Alliance and its mission concerning agriculture here, but the main idea is that a bunch of NGOs got together to save the rainforests and promote economically viable alternatives to clear-cutting. One of those alternatives is cacao farming:

We are in the midst of planning two lectures for the alumni when they visit to give them more insight on the certification and its effects on the national economy and farmers. We're still waiting to hear on whether the lectures will happen for sure. The first would be from an NGO from Quito in the "Rainforest Alliance" that knows about the certification process. The second would be the real deal scoop from a student here on the ground in Tena who is studying the impact of Rainforest Alliance.

Organic just means.. no spray and more bugs. Youch!

As we mentioned in the last blog post, before Kallari, farmers would sell to intermediaries who had the market power to set prices. These intermediaries would buy cacao at low costs, dry it, and then sell high to chocolate factories. Without a way to dry their own beans, the farmers have no way to skip the middle-man and sell to the chocolate factory.

(2) Enter Kallari´s Collection Center

The cooperative constructed their own drying center. Now the cooperative buys cacao from its 21

associations at fair prices and sells directly to the factory in Quito and another in Las Salinas (near Tena). During harvest season, the Kallari cacao technicians go out every friday and saturday to buy it in bulk from their associations. We are going on one of these buying rounds tomorrow at 6.30 am so we´ll take some pictures and let you know how it. Here is a little more about the process of harvesting and drying on a website called Bean to Bar.

When fresh, cacao has white pulp surrounding the bean. It is the most amazing and addicting taste ever. On average, a farmer can earn 50 cents for a cacao mazorca like the pictuer below. Then the beans are taken from the cascara (shell) and put to dry and ferment in some boxes further up the hill (you can see them later in the short movie we made which will be uploaded as soon as we find an Internet connection fast enough!)

The white pulp dries off, the bean´s insides begin to crack and liquids drain out. The beans are then brought to the solar houses to dry for more time (up to two weeks). Like the NYT article says, the Kichwa were advised by Dr. Jorge Ruiz on how to build the infrastructure for and monitor the fermentation process .

Here is a closeup of the inside of a solar house. Brooke and her itchy legs pour out the cacao beans. One of the possible projects while the alumni are here will be to decide whether it would be possible to design a solar-run fan to help decrease the time necessary for the beans to dry. Any takers? At the end of the solar drying process (yes, there is a machine, but they don´t use it), the beans are supposed to be a certain way...

Try your hand at this. Which of the beans below are well fermented?

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Okay! The blue circled one is poorly fermented because it is not cracked and dried inside. This bean will still taste acidic when eaten since they are all still stuck in the bean´s flesh. However, the green one is almost PERFECTLY fermented.
Well folks, until later when we bring you (3) the factory and (4) the Kallari Cafe...

First Time Espanol

2010-06-30T15:58:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, we met with Uli from GTZ, an NGO that works with the Kallari Cooperative. During the conversation, I realized that it might be useful for the alumni to know some key Spanish words relating to the cocoa processes!

Here it is in a paragraph that gives some information a la vez:

Kallari is a cooperativa of campesinos that grow cacao on their fincas. Many communities in the region of Tena participate in the cooperativa. There are 850 familias in the 21 different comunidades. Each comunidad has an asociación that is responsible for all the familias in their region. Each asociación is run by people within the comunidad. This gives Kallari many working parts that are each autonomous from one another.

To start their finca , the campesinos must sembrar the arboles de cacao. During harvesting time, the campesinos cosechan the mazorcas. The asociación collects and sells the cacao from the fincas in their comunidad to the Oficina de Kallari. Kallari pays the campesinos more than the intermediarios who typically buy at low prices from the campesinos and sell at high prices to fabricas of chocolate. Kallari then sends the cacao to the Centro de Acopios to be secar. Here, there is also a small vivero where young arboles de cacao are nurtured.

After the long proceso de secado, Kallari sends the chocolate to their fabrica of chocolate in Quito, four hours north of Tena.

Key for Spanish - English

a la vez - at the same time
cooperativa - cooperative
campesinos - farmers
cacao - cocoa
finca - farm
familia ( s ) - familie ( s )
comunidad ( s ) - community ( ies )
asociación - association
sembrar ( v.) - to sew ( in this case, to plant a tree )
arboles de cacao -cocoa trees
cosechar ( v.) - to harvest
mazorcas - pods ( of cocoa )
oficina de Kallari - office of Kallari
intermediarios - intermediaries
fabricas - factory ( ies )
centro de acopios - collection center
secar ( v.) - to dry
vivero - nursery
proceso de secado - drying process

Phew! I'm sick of taking buses!

2010-06-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

01' 00” Ica-Pisco
00' 20” Pisco-Chincha
01' 00” Chincha-Canete
04' 00” Canete-Lima
14' 00” Lima-Chiclayo
09' 00” Chiclayo-Tumbes
11” 00' Huaquillas-Ambato
04” 30' Ambato-Tena

Equals 44 hours 50 minutes of bus travel in the last 5 days (route here). With just a quick jog across the bridge from Aguas Verdes to Huayquillas and here we are in Ecuador.

During our trip from Ica to Tena, we visited NGOs in Pisco, Chincha, Canete, and Chiclayo. The NGOs all agreed that our documentary needs more context as well as some statistics to help people contextualize what our message is all about. We let those thoughts settle as we slept, tumbled, and rolled onto each new destination.

When we got to Ecuador, many things changed. Prices got a lot higher (the cost of living in Quito is about half that of New York City but of course the jungle is much cheaper), street vendors started selling a whole lot of fried plantains (here is a recipe for corbiche, a typical platter here), and the buses started to make new stops at drug control stations (the wikipedia article about the Ecuador-Columbian relations isn't too detailed). At these drug control stations, the luggage doors on the bus get opened up, people sniff around and check random bags, and sometimes they come onboard to check the bathrooms. Along the way, though, this man-on-duty found something unexpected...

Can you guess what that is? If you said, “squirrel in a cage,” then you'd be right! A very cool and collected mother let her two lovely children bring two squirrels in little cages on our 11 hour bus ride from the border to their home in the mountain-town Ambato. We couldn't hear what was going on from where we were sitting, but he shook his head like he was about to throw the poor things out. Somehow, the mother was very charismatic or the children looked so stricken with sadness (or some combination of both) that the soldier let them have it. As the bus rolled North through its first few stops in little towns, we saw our first glimpse at the fields and fields of the banana trees of Ecuador, the blueblue sky, and the amazing clouds...

I guess greenery is pretty awesome when you've been living in a desert. Eleven hours and a few curves in the mountains later... we arrived in Ambato at midnight, and everything was dark.

The view in Ambato was amazing when we woke up the next morning though..

We took a break (and a shower!) in the ninth largest town of Ecuador Ambato which is home to 350,000 people. In the morning, we discovered that Ambato-ians like eggs, toast, warm milk, and guava juice in the morning with a big dose of the 9:30am World Cup Game (0-0). We packed at 10am and watched the World Cup (0-0). Bought our tickets at 10:30am and watched the World Cup go into overtime (still 0-0). Got on the bus and watched the World Cup (still 0-0). But as we left Ambato, the signal began to break up as they went into penalty kicks. Everyone was watching and waiting... breath held hoping that the bus would get a red light or something!

But we got to watch it all as Paraguay won 5-3 against Japan to move onto the quarter-finals. People in the bus were pretty excited. Neither Peru and Ecuador have teams in the world cup so I think it's all about South American pride. Anyways, we ascended some mountains, descended some mountains, and drove straight into the heart of the Oriente (video about oil- there are many perspectives on this if you are interested in hearing both sides, you should keep searchin... but this video of sights and sounds is less charged with opinions). Here are some pictures along the route, but it's hard to capture the breath-taking view in a moving bus without panaromic memory:

Tunnel through a mountain on the bus

We didn't know what to expect when we got to Tena, but we were both excited to finally see the sign after all the traveling.

According to an Ecuadorian who joined us for lunch when we arrived Tena, the region attracts a fair amount of tourists to go rafting on the rapids, sightseeing for animals in the jungle, etc. (Read more about Tena's main attractions here). This year, however, has been quite slow due to a recent flooding. We took a taxi to Kallari's office (one out of a million chance that a taxista would know? Or is Kallari much more popular than expected?).

We stopped in the office, but Uli wasn't there. We hadn't called ahead of time, but we thought we'd give it a shot. We found our place, laid down our bags, and basically called it a day. Dona Vilma (the owner of the hostel) cooked us an amazing dish called chambolte, and we drank tea as she told us the story of how Kallari began.... but more on that later.

The bugs are singing outside as I write, and the humidity is thinning. The hammocks outside are rocking in the rain storm, and the frogs are hopping in and out of a puddle outside. It is quiet enough to hear most everything despite the occasional passing of a car on the busy road nearby.

PS This is what we've dubbed the hairy tree:

Any guesses as to what the foliage creeping all over it is?

My grandma says

2010-06-25T14:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

My grandmother has requested more pictures of our faces. Here they are:

Oh wait, are we in a Starbucks?!? Heck yes, we are. Let's just say ... LIMA. Rico rico. We are waiting to meet with an NGO but in the meantime needed Wi-Fi and electricity to edit. Worth a 12 Sole ($4) hot chocolate?

Ask Adam. He ordered it.

PS here is a picture from our stay in the mountains with Antonio of Lutheran World Relief:

piscopiscoPISCO

2010-06-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

First off, here is that picture that wouldn't load last time.

Second off, here is a picture of the rickshaw. Yah, Suprio! Dhaval!
Here are some pictures to accompany the last post:

In other news, the documentary is starting to come together. It is in eight separate parts right now. Most of them (6/8) are done in their “long version.” Later, we will have to come back and really slice and dice it down.

The water tower is so that all the houses can finally have running water. Dishes, toilets, clothes... everything will be able to have a hook-up. Since our homestay family probably doesn´t have a land title for the property they are on, I doubt that they will have one. On Sunday, we moved in. Our homestay grandma told us that so long as she is alive, we will have a room to stay in. The house is really big, but I suppose that it should be expected when you have 12 children. Now they´re all grown and only Juan, Laura, and Celia are living here. Here is a new addition to the family:
In the picture below, Rosa and Marcela are making ¨olmita¨ which is this delicious mix of ground corn, sugar, cinnamon, clove, and some butter. Then they put it inside of cleaned corn husks and boil it in a large pot. We made up some corn shellers to aid in the process and realized some of their flaws and theorized how to make them better.

The texture changes from mushy baby food to tamale texture. It´s a great breakfast food with some steaming hot quaker (for those of you just tuning in, that´s like a really viscous oatmeal drink)

Brooke was down with a fever for a bit, but totally revived by some hot tea and rest for the morning. Meanwhile, Adam chopped up the tree in the front yard alongside Edwin. They are spiky trees.

Yesterday we worked in the casita all day long (10am until 8pm) with a short lunch break. During our lunch break, we showed Marcela and Juan how to work the drip irrigation kit that we struggled so hard to bring from India.

We showed the kids that dropped by what we were working on and some of their random videos. Afterwards, we gave them a compilation of all of their documentaries on DVDs. They gave us some nice feedback about how their NGOs came across (Henry Flores of the United Nations Program for Development was too ¨austere and mean looking¨) and what they thought was missing. There is a clip of Marcela (our homestay grandma) cutting apart a tree with a machete. The voice over says: ¨Our family woke up early and worked hard all day.¨ One of our students commented, ¨A lot of people get up much earlier and go work in the farm. And that´s hard work.¨ More than anything, they said that the culture just wasn´t there. So we lent them some flipcams for while we´re in Ecuador so they can record a short film of ¨the way of life¨ in Manco Capac is. But now, we´re packing and off....

FELIZ DIA DE PAPAS!!!!

2010-06-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

For those of you who can´t speak ¨Adam-ese,¨ that last post meant that we are now nearing the end of the documentary-making, moving to Manco Capác to be near the students, and have many full stomachs.

We visited our students yesterday (a nice bike ride from the plaza de armas to the outskirts of Ica). The scenery change was amazing. Honking taxis, blurs of yellow and blue, and suspicious adolescents on the streets... and then the view of breath-taking mountains and clear blue sky. The stalks of corn are very tall, oh so tall. There are a few new buildings along the way, but most noticeably, a paved street. On the bumpy, dirt road of Avenida Manco Capác, we encounter Gloria´s husband Martine and our student Jimmy, who is in the midst of mixing concrete for his new house. To our surprise, there are some new houses that have been built by Aportes (long gone). Our students Brayahan, Alison, Jimmy, and Rocio now have concrete blocks within to sleep.

The family is doing well. Everyone is older.

Soon off to Ecuador.

Highlights

2010-06-19T08:09:00.000-07:00

Brooke - Communitycations is the new socioeconomic sustainability

Anonymous - Jason, you were an accident.

Anonymous - Si yo tuviera una cola pasariamos todo el dia jugando.

Borracho - I just escaped from prison, can you help me with food so the police don't catch me?

Adam - Lomo saltado sin pina.

Brooke - $10 running Nikf shoes.

Juan - Come anytime and we'd love to have you - tenemos ya un cuarto listo para uds.

¡ It´s electric !

2010-06-15T15:39:00.000-07:00

Let me highlight the last 6 days for you!

We landed in Lima, lost a debit card somewhere (haha, I bet you think it was me, debbie!), and then stayed in a gross hotel. Our taxi driver told us that the world cup would start at 6am, but no one woke up that early. Around noon, we managed to get to the bus stop which would take us south. When we plugged in the computer, it sent a shock through Brooke. We decided to (1) call Apple to ask about this electric phenomena and then (2) order our travel insurance to make sure we were covered if the hard drive, camera, or adam got snatched. That took somewhere on the order of 4 hours and then we hopped on a bus for 5 hours. The next afternoon, Brooke managed to make a power strip smoke, blow the electricity for the entire third floor of a hotel, and block Final Cut Pro from being usable. Adam found somewhere to stay for 1.80 per person per night. This very seems expensive to us, and moving there takes all day. Here are some pictures of what we can see outside our window, and Adam taking footage off of our roof. In the upper right hand corner, there is a very very large sand dune. cause we´re in the middle of a desert. Fancy that!

Did I mention that it is the 447t anniversary of the town that we are staying in? There was a march-off: WHICH SCHOOL CAN MARCH THE BEST?!? Every single school in Ica had their kids in uniforms. I think I mentioned this. But Peruvians march funny so its worth mentioning again. This also means that everyone will be drunk on Wednesday.

On Sunday, we decided that we needed bikes to get around because walking is too slow and mototaxis are too expensive. Miraculously, this takes 4.5 hours (despite knowing where to find used bikes), and when we leave, an entire pedal falls off. We also realize that we don´t have locks, and Adam returns to rectify both of these things. Brooke continues onwards, buys tupperware, forks, and snacks. We reconvene for 2.5 hours of Internet.

Monday and Tuesday, we are finally able to work on the documentary for the entirety of two days. We are both tired of staring at the computer screen for so long, but Professor Bald! We´re doing it!

[There used to be this awesome picture of us working on the computer with the storyboard in sticky notes here, but i cant get it to download. BOO!]

Peru-Ecuador-Peru

2010-06-13T14:55:00.000-07:00

The Peruvian Flag has a vicuna (like a llama), cinchona tree (provides quinine), a cornucopia with gold coins, and a wreath from the Peruvian indígenas Tupac Katari.

Yup, that´s right. We´re back in Peru! But wait.. there´s more:

This blog will follow Brooke and Adam through their adventures in Southern Peru in their attempt to finalize a draft of their documentary (Escuchen! trans. Listen Up!), co-edit with some of their students from Manco Capac, travel to Tena, Ecuador for a rumble with some fair-trade, chocolate-dealing cacao farmers, and then back to Peru to finish what we´ve started.

The beginning´s been rough with long bus rides and sparse internet connection, but we´ve managed to rent ourselves a nice room near a bustling market. For $1.50 a night per person, it´s not bad! In the morning there is fruit in the market (10 apples for 30 cents) and smoothies (1 cup is about 50 cents) and ten little breads for 30 cents. It´s great, actually.

So, we´ll keep y´all posted on our research, progress, and happenings right here at bandaperu.blogspot.com

As per last year´s requests, we will keep things short and sprinkle our posts with as many pictures as possible.

Buenas noches! Voy a comer mi carapulcra!

And every one is waiting

2009-08-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

Monday, 24 Agosto 2009

Don't get me wrong, we have a plan for distribution, but how can it be made better?

What are we going to do with all this stuff? Where do we send it? What is the distribution plan now that we have everything gathered? Oh, it's not gathered. But this message we are going to transmit. How is it organized. How is the information tailored. Designed and arranged. A website of photos, videos, text. There's a message embedded in it all, but how to format, present, and give that message to the people who matter. Do we have art on our hands. Can it be given

We have an idea of sending the kids movies to the NGOs that we worked with in the South, all organizations working on reconstruction. Maybe NGOs working on disaster relief elsewhere. We want to give them to government representatives in the Ica department. But how high up should this be spouted? Alan Garcia, here comes the Voces del Pueblo straight outta Caserio Manco Cápac, Señor de Luren, y Nueva Esperanza!

If you have distribution suggestions, would like hardcopies of their final videos, or general comments for the project.. you know, hit us up in the comments section.

Oops there goes gravity

2009-08-23T21:32:00.000-07:00

Saturday, 22 Agosto 2009

Chocotejas and sweet manipackingmaking cardstaping surprises to doorssaying good bye to familyCHOCHE! and delicious home made chifarepackingtravel travel to Limameet choche's sister, chat, repacktaxi friend named Edwin to the airport, but first the last dinnerairportREPACKsit back, sleep, and go to Miami where the blog does not follow

8am and we are putting the extra bags on the bike rack, tying them with minimal string in engineering tradition. We slso divvy up the peanuts and chocolate goodies with some thank you cards to the families that have been so kind to put their thoughts, time, and money into hosting us. They have been of the utmost importance to whatever success has come from this project in this small farmland. Without them, we would have never been able to find our host family our set of dedicated kids. For this, we've become eternally grateful, but can only return these sweets as tokens of our affection.We attach them to the morning bread deliveries with pieces of duct tape while sipping our morning quaker in little mugs decorated with pictures of blue ribbons. Our last cups. We walk along in the early morning and the sun is just kissing the tops of the mountains. It sounds nice, but it was sort of like walking to the end of the earth and it was ripping us apart.

(music picks up slowly as pensive travelers board the tico to Ica, nodding off. Cuts to Ica and boarding the Soyuz bus. Two nodding off, Brooke remains pensively looking out the window. Two get off, and one continues on bus. music hits a climax. Brooke and Adam board mototaxi and head for Choche's house. Music dies off as we pull up to Choche's house.)

Choche's house is being added to with a front garage and overhang for hanging out in the heat of the upcoming summer while being protected from the certain rains while also being in reach of the outdoor oven for grilled goodness. Some people just seem to know how to design without thinking of design charts and selection criteria - hmmm maybe cuz its common f-ing sense?! But no, we must teach it in painful detail many times since we are MIT Course 1 and you need this to graduate from MIT. Ok, I'm done.

Choche's mom treats us to a great lunch of savory chicken and fat fried plantain that she knows we like oh-so-much. We also enjoy some manjar blanco with bread while catching up with the family and giving them gifts of tamales, chocotejas, and mani confitado. Somehow it is very satisfying that we made these all ourselves (helped anyways).

As we are packing up, Adam tries an experiment. He knows Choche will try and give us gifts of Pisco, and believes this is too generous of him. Before he can do anything, Adam asks to buy a bottle of Pisco to take home. Choche laughs and says "Puta, huevon, no cobro solo regalo." Adam insists. Ok, Choche nods in what could never be construed for agreement. "Compra una y yo les regalo dos otras botellas." Now we have to say yes since its a gift.

The results of the experiment were analyzed to be positive since we likely ended up paying for another bottle of Pisco that he likely would have not accepted had he invited us first. More research is needed, tho.

Choche says he cannot go to Lima to visit Frank with us. Frank calls. Choche is now going. Its hard to say no to friends, especially when your reason is you need to sell pencils for charity at noon the next day!

After offloading random items we find particularly useless, we're off to the bus again, picking up where we left off a few hours earlier. We simply traded Anthony for Choche. It was a tough decision but we think his powerful size and rebounding capability on the interior cannot be passed up, even if it means sacrificing the smooth stroke and clutch skills of the Bebeto of Italian basketball.

Frank is awaiting us at Choche's sister's place in Lima. She has a really nice house where she and her husband rent out rooms for international study abroad university students studying at La Pacifica or La Catolica. We meet two - Brandon and Ali. Brandon is from Colorado so Brooke tackles him. Ali is into beer commercials and checking out the nightlife of Peru so Choche and Frank bat their eyelashes his direction. Adam laughs by himself at the contrast he feels so heavy. Brooke and him haven't showered for (blank) days. Alcohol is far from his mind. Much less hookers. Several powers less hookers and alcohol whenever possible. Brooke, you feeling me?

But is satisfying to see Frank again and hang out with Choche. We don't cover much ground, tho, from a catching up perspective. Maybe its unimportant, and what needs to be said is societally accepted statements and short stories pertaining to said context.

After dropping off our homemade gifts from Ica, I can't help but think how much less valuable the gifts had become as we moved away from the community we made them. I had imagined the opposite when I was making them, but was clearly wrong. It seems to be more a function of the specificness of the gift, the specialness of the gift, and the manner in which it is given and received. It also struck me that although chocotejas are "native" to Ica, Lima residents may eat more than Manco Capac residents. Maybe not, that is a assumptious statement.

Taxi driver to the airport was great. He agreed to help us find some food nearby - a cheap menu. And we found some $1 meals of rice and chicken. And a belt.

The line at the airport was ridic. We got 75% through before they rushed our flight to the front and said "Good luck, you might not make it!"

But we did. Kinda barely due to an incredibly slow immigration lady in my line as well as the only cash restriction on the airport tax collection system.

And we flew, taking off at nearly 1am. A pasta dinner was served after take-off which was not expected. The food had little taste, but I savored the texture. And the butter. And then I scrapbooked for maybe the last time. I went slowly since I was watching Star Trek. For the first time.

The first time.

Friday, 21 Agosto 2009

After a day off from Ica, we clearly miss it and need to return. So Adam does. Operators’ orders were only one could come. So we brought two – Malu and Alison. Malu is amazing artistic, with pensive eyes that look like a samurai lady-warriors’ while making political decisions. She is 28 and listens regularly to the radio program we are going to. We know this because it sometime runs as we finish up our workout on the playground on the other side of her house. Alison is 17 and the daughter of Gloria. Punto y seguido. ‘Nuff said.
Al toque Roque.

We arrive early for the radio program since we have been there before to film. The radio program is broadcast from a tiny station on the third floor of a building. The chicas are nervous. Then, as expected, the program makes the girls decide which one is to be interviewed. Alison’s name is drawn out of the hat. She is the more fluid speaker, but also will provide less-informed content for the event compared to Malu’s in-depth understanding of what the workshops are all about.

The interview is short and sweet. We then head down to print out more advertisement flyers to post and to hand out as well as registration sheets for the event starting at 5:30pm tonight. Then we head over to the Mercado to pick up cebada and azucar and cups for the warm drink to be served during the late-night theater we are about to put on. Here the other two split for school and home to cook depending on the age. Adam stays to buy chocolate and manjar (dulce de leche) for chocotejas as well as a kilo of mani for mani confitado (roasted sweet peanuts). Then internet to check for responses to our email invitations. Then a couple reminder calls to people who had said they were thinking of going or in fact going. The following seems to be slightly stronger than Adam had expected.
Meanwhile back at the choza, Brooke buys DVDs off of a local resident and begins to burn the DVDs for the documentary. This process goes semi-smoothly until a freak accident causes the computer to drain its battery and suddenly crash. After a few tens of minutes of panic the computer decides to behave and everything gets finished up a little after Adam returns.

Set-up for the event starts at 3:30pm. This is also a few minutes after Anthony DiLiberto shows up. Anthony is a star hailing from the beginning of our blog, one or two days in. He was in fact our very first NGO interview! Anthony is a red-headed Spanish speaking machine from California and committed to being kind to everyone who crosses his path. Like helping us set up for starters.

Chairs and tables are moved immediately to set up an advertising station complete with a dry-erase marker board with a eye-catching design drawn by Brahayan, the youngest member of our workshop. APORTES, the NGO most currently active in this region, helps us out with the projector. Malu has speakers. Each of the students brought wood for the pot. The pot we used was a pot for the Community Cup of Milk program which provides government subsidized milk to kids. More than APORTES, Red Cross represeped with Ascension from Pisco. Henry reped PNUD Pisco, while later PNUD Ica as well as a regional director of PNUD who happened to be conducting an evaluation in person with the Peru PNUD operations. The Arquitectos de la Emergencia showed up in force after taking awhile to find the place. Proetica sent a rep as well, but it appears that Caritas did not show up – a big deal since the Caritas presence was very strong at some point and messages were designed for Caritas to hear. Their lack of attendance was as much a disgraceful showing of support for the community they once worked in. But those that did show up really impressed the participants in the workshop and vice-versa. My theory is because they were all the most quality NGO people we ran into. In addition there was at least one municipality rep; how long he stayed will forever be a mystery.

Juan helps set up a frame to stretch the cloth out onto the frame. His claim of holding a degree in Duct Tape Engineering has now been confirmed by inspection.

After delay problems with the speakers we switch DVD players and the audio comes out excellent. Once it finally got started around 6:30pm everyone was feeling worn out and ready to head back almost. But they hung out and for some it was a time to get to walk around their new surroundings. For others it was used to buy some sweets at the local tienda. Some were familiar with the region and had even done work there. They were interested in seeing how things have changed since then.

The show lasted about 1.5 hours and was a great success from the eyes of most. The only complaints were a couple community members were rumored to later think that the results of such a screening that involved critique of NGOs would lead to less aid received due to hurt feelings. This is precisely the attitude we coached out of the kids, so of course it is prevalent in the community. The four movies played beautifully in the following order:
1. Pamela and Yubi
2. Alison and Carlos
3. Malu and Cecilia
4. Brahayan and Elaine

People awed while Pamela and Cecilia’s video showed selectively black and white footage from a couple days after the earthquake. Everyone laughed when Carlos danced while describing his opinion of NGO intervention in the region. The audience was stunned by Malu’s editing skills at matching marches, political music, and political cartoons to introduce her movie. Every part of the event was done by the kids themselves as well. This resulted in a little conclusion at times as to who would say what when, but in the end they figured it all out and gave time at the end to encourage questions and discussions. Unfortunately only one NGO rep had the courage to take advantage of this unique opportunity to hear back from kids in such a setting, especially it being on the home turf.

Tonite we were not planning on sleeping since we still had to pack everything as well as make a large batch of sweet peanuts an chocotejas (which take awhile due to the shelling of the pecans). But all of the sudden, we´re soaking in the sounds and movements inside a cinder block home constructed by the very NGOs that we have been turning the critical eye. There are chairs lined with straight backs along the walls. The room is large enough to fit 15 people with enough space left over for a small dance floor in the middle. Yubi's smile seems tired, but she's the quinciñera girl so her eyes stayed peeled.

We were only tonite invited to invade this space tonight. She just finished her final project, previewed to an audience larger than any one expected, and we're just beginning at 10pm. The story is her friends wouldn't let her get away with not having a party. Quite possibly the most gratifying moment of our class pops out of nowhere as 6 of our students describe how they have become friends through this class. But they are not talking to us, it is amongst themselves. I hadn't expected this.

It's 1am now. We've downed carapulcra. We've sipped pisco. We're blowing out candles on a cake. It's all last minute planned, but the family scurries about, taking a taxi as far as the center (30 minutes one-way) to purchase a frosted cake. Someone has written her name on top of it with icing. I wonder how many other names they've frosted on cakes before in their lifetime. But this is especially for Yubi, and the lights go out. The camera rolls and zooms in our her lungs taking in the air and her face as she makes a wish before blowing out the candle. The room is hot from dancing even though the door is opened and the weather is biting.

Juan shows no signs of stopping though and by the time we leave at 1:30am, he is rearing to start in on Chocotejas and sugar coated peanuts. Antony gives me this look that says, you guys are crazy. Then he proceeds to say, you guys are crazy. You know, some people go on ridiculously jam packed tourist sprints in their last week of Peru. we apparently need a cooking frenzy before he leaves. Others need sleep. But FIRST, let's peel pecans. Now, let's just get this out of the way: pecan peeling is an art. You gotta know what you're doing to get that rough outer shell apart from the fleshy, sensational delicious insides. With fingernail. With other pecans. You crack open that thickness and slowly extract the outer coating to reveal the sculptured perfection within.It takes Antony about twenty tries. But then... the moment we had all been waiting for: a lovely peeled pecan with all the right parts accentuated and clean. The white chocolate boils quietly in the background.Then we double check the pecans. We count them. We split the manjar (Like caramel but better). We make sandwiches with two halves of each pecan with the sugar coating between them, hugging and filling every internal crack and curve of the wrinkly delicacy. Juan starts his mani mystery mix on the stove. We are blind and hardly notice until its too late. Forever it will remain unknown. (Except to Adam who was doing it with him. Sugar and water and cinnamon and let it cook. Then swirl it like you wanna twirl it.) "You have to have patience," Juan preaches as he cradles each and every pecan sandwich into the melted chocolate bowl, coating every side until ... sorry for the excessive details

It only takes till 4am to finish everything, leaving us with a couple hours to get packed. We pack prepared to ride our bikes to Ica and then bus them to Chincha in hopes of selling them there since they go for a bit more money. Then out of nowhere our other host brother, Raul, and his wife express interest and we end up knocking the price down to $27 for each bike and all the accessories included. Anthony is glad to see this deal go down as he was not overly excited about riding a bike after no sleep and only party.

Ok, so we will arbitrarily end this blog at 7am on Saturday morning, since sleepless nights mess with blog separation.

Thursday, 20 Agosto 2009

Today was the big tamales day. See Mami is a huge tamales maestra. She is widely known for her delicious tamales back in the day she had kids to help her around the house. She also proudly informs us that at a cost of 60 soles she was taught by a renowned chef with a name. Aparently she used to make upwards of 300 at a time toe distribute to nearby clusters of houses. It is no longer worth it she says. She used to make around 20 soles of profits but that has dissipated with the rise in costs of materials.

This is where being two people comes in handy. We decide on deciding into shifts to cover more ground. Mami and Juan are very set on helping us learn how to make tamales, so we don’t want to make them feel us even a tad ungrateful or stressed out). Adam takes the first shift, which involves prepping the banana leaves by first cutting the leaves down, burning them slightly to give them more flexibility, washing them, then dividing them into piles based on how torn the individual parts are. Each size has a role it can play in the grand scheme of tamaleing.

The corn is pealed (it came that way – factory done she says) and ground. Then it is cooked in meat juice from the roasted pork. The spices and flavor mix (aderezo) is then made. The ground corn is later put with the aderezo and we now have a solidified mass of corn dough with flavors hanging out inside. Stick some of the meat and olives in the dough and then close it all up in a large banana leaf wrapped with banana stalk strands and the tamale is ready to be cooked.

Yeh the process takes two days. Minimo. Back in the day she might make consecutive batches and end up repeating the process for weeks at a time if there was heavy demand for her tamales. Seems she really enjoyed doing that back in the day. She also liked eating the pork fat as she cooked and blames that for the high cholesterol that she now has according to the clinic.

All night long the tamales bubble. All night long the humans sleep. All night long the cat sleeps near the fire of the tamales. All night long, oso the dog, barely moves as he slowly dies. All night long the wood becomes flames which output smoke and splashes and bubbles and black soot on the pot bottom. Energy a la carbonara.

While one is working on tamales (Brooke for most of the day due to her savvy hand-eye coordination and lightning facial quirks) the other is out working with students to finish editing their videos. We work with all the different groups, spending time at the beginning of the morning to work with Malu – If you knew Malu you would know that anytime spent with her is worthwhile since she wants to learn. She is nearly done but has to go finish lunch for her family and also has to wash some clothes. Unfortunately her group is still missing a couple audio takes that the group wants to do together. This ends up happening later in the night, since we don’t have an urgent need for light.

Pamela and Yubi’s video is done and edited by Pamela on her own computer using WinDVD and Pinnacle.

Brahayan and Elaine’s video is finished up as well.

Alison and Carlos were already done.

Great! That means we are able to do our dry run today at 6:30 as everyone had agreed upon.

Oh yeh, the other goal of this day is to do THE FINAL AND ONLY RUN THROUGH of the final activity. It is a Thursday, usually the tough day for the students to make it, not to mention the working mom participant named Rocio, who arrives at 5pm and immediately has to feed her family and clean the house and watch after her grandkid Nicole.

5 students of the expected 8 show up. We had planned to celebrate with a pecan banana pie Brooke had made as well as some crackers and soda from the tienda. We simply watch the videos that we can, critique a very little bit. We announce the teams that were nominated for the aforementioned recognition as Most Artistic, Most interesting, Most informative, Best quality of picture.

After the rest leave, Malu is thirsty to finish her video and wants to spend all night working on it. Which Brooke kindly offers to help her in any way she can. Brooke heads to Malu’s humble abode, while Adam runs some errands including returning cameras and congratulating kids for completing their videos beyond our expectations (which weren’t very high to begin with.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Adam falls asleep writing the blog.

Wednesday, 19 Agosto 2009

Visiting NGOs and Municipal offices today to personally invite them is Adam’s charge for the day. This also involves posting flyers for the events in the appropriate ofices in order to increase the visibility of our event. The kids are of course doing great things, and we want to be sure and make a valiant effort to make good on the large number of contacts that we have of Reconstruction NGOs working in Ica.

First, we stop by the Tinguina municipality to advertise the event for the municipal workers there. Ayme, a sister of Gloria and Adrianna, works in the office there as an administrator. She helps us format our formal invite to the mayor, while also informing us that he never shows up personally to events that are not higher level meetings. He’ll send a rep, tho (hopefully…) MCLCP in Ica is also interested in these kinds of things so we go there after. The secretary is in but no one else. Same as last time. But the secretary is named Freddie and he’s very into our project. We post a couple flyers for the event in their office as well as describe our project in a bit of detail for him so that he can explain it to the others quite well without us having to worry that he’s not got it whole.

Then to CODEHICA. They are pretty interested as well and Charo, the head of the radio department, invites us to a live radio interview on the Voces por la Reconstruccion (Voices for the Reconstruction) program this upcoming Friday. Adam convinces them to allow us to bring a student with us as well. I’ve never spoken on a radio program before but I have a feeling that this opportunity will be great for any kid who is interested in learning. Pepe, from the video dept, says he will definitely come and a couple others from the office echo this commitment.

PNUD is next. Of course, Hernan and Rosario are not in yet. Again we do the “hang out with the secretary and post the room up as well”. Then we head to the Arquitectos de Emergencia, who said they would likely come, but this way we could get them to commit and then also we asked them about the possibility of buying 1 to 3 bicycles.

Brooke tears through the Mercado El Modelo on the western side of Ica, determined to prove to Mami that she can shop like a Peruviana. She feints left, then spins around a kid grasped to a mothers chest. Ducking under the bananas (5 por un sol) and sniffs out the correct spices needed for making delicious tamales. We are missing cumin, olives, pork, pepper, achiote, mani and some other things. In addition she has the handicap of Adam’s scribbled shopping list to guide her down her path to certain failure.

To the dismay of all her critics, Brooke ends up finding everything with time to spare, even managing to find quality chicha de jora for making celebratory fermented throat lubricant for the roof raising on their soon-to-be new place.

2009-08-19T07:24:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, 18 August 2009

We’ve planned a whole lot for our final event on Friday. Things are going really smoothly. We have about 6 confirmed NGO representatives coming, we are visiting the municipality of La Tinguiña tomorrow to invite them personally as well as some from Ica proper, the electronics are almost all sorted out, and we’ve even posted 10 signs all over the town in key locations. Four of our 10ish students have small flyers to pass out and it looks like we even have permission to use a local tienda to host the event. The kids agreed to each bring a piece of wood, a bucket of water, and some sugar so that we can make coffee for the attending audience.

Everything’s ready. Except for the kids’ movies. Uh oh.

So today we have dedicated most of our hours to helping to kids edit by commenting on their order, their aesthetic eyes as well as ways to make their movies really demonstrate their message. We’ve heard that Peruvians aren’t really open to critique, but they seem to be taking it well.

At 6:00 am, Señor Lopez is tearing down the fence to re-do it with fresh Cincha reeds.

At 7:00am, a cocoon is shed.

At 7:30am, tea is boiled and quaker is already on the table. Both go cold.

At 8:00am, we are half sleeping and half reviewing the raw footage that Pamela has to work with.

At 8:30am, we are pulling out our hair, but partially still inside the warmth of our beds.

At 8:55am, we are packing our breakfasts to go in plastic bottles and tapas.

We start early at 9am with Pamela who is doingher own video in her own house with her own editing program called Pinnacle. Her father sometimes takes pictures and photos at birthday parties which she then puts together for a digital scrap book. At some point she demonstrated one of her projects for us. She has to have a mountain of patience to stare at fifteen year olds in dresses throwing on smiles all day long for cameras during their party. I definitely could not do it.

Pamela and Yubi have put together something that they think encompasses their message. We notice that they have the takes they did during the scavenger hunt as well as some footage from a few days after the earthquake that her dad took. Their message is that there has been a lot of help from NGOs and partially from the government, but that more is needed. They set out to make contrasts between those who have received aid and those who have not. We suggest that since they have an ideal group (one with aid and one without out), they might be able to demonstrate this message better by doing a tour and explanation of their respective living situations. Pamela tells us that she doesn’t want to be another person asking for help because there is still needs everywhere in the South, but this sparks a new idea for everyone. Since they can get footage of their house, their community, and a bit of pictures to represent the Ica department, they will be able to demonstrate that the video that they’ve made is just a small part of a much, much larger picture. Their movie will be a just one case study of thousands in the affected departmento. Cool. We will meet back with you at 4pm to do that.

We wish her good luck with her movie and meet with Malú to ask about her speakers. Returning things to Ica will be a large pain in taxi or by bike so we are trying to avoid it all together. They work just fine. Check. Now just gotta ask the dueño.

Then we clean bicycles all day. Every inch so that we can sell them back to Peru. The water is dirty, the rags are retired, and our fingers ache from the sparkling goodness of our well-used transports. The mountains in the background, under the sun, seem extra sharp today. Like sharp cheddar.

At 4pm, we check in with Pamela again at Yubi’s house. Yubi gets ready to do her takes, but by the time she is on the edge of beginning to record in groups, her mother gives the stern orders to finish her essay. You can play tomorrow, little one. So mostly what gets done here is a recap of the morning for Yubi and even more planning. Hopefully the drafting and redrafting of this documentary of theirs will really show the work and time they’ve been putting in for their final showing.

Add in a trip to the store and more bike cleaning (basta, ¡ya están!) before our next meeting at 6:30 with Carlos and Alison. We pass by people flying kites.. okay, trying to fly kites, on our way over. It’s a beautiful sunset today.

Carlos and Alison aren’t there yet, but Brayahan stomps over with his camera as well as Elaine’s camera. He’s says, “I wanna make a movie.” Wow. So we wait for Alison, Carlos, and Adam to get there before we hike back to the house. He is a little bit shy with his stuff, more willing to just string videos together rather than plan things out or give the movie intention. We try to prod him along to stick with his original message (Hey community! Be united!) as well as to use his takes to his advantage since he has lots of different places during the second anniversary.

Alison and Carlos storm into the room, accompanied by Adam. It’s a little cramped, people are a little confused about what’s going on, Brooke’s tongue is stuck in her mouth, and computers are sucking up electricity like it’s no one’s business. There are three laptops going at once, and somehow we don’t get a single video finished. It’s okay though.

Dinner time! Delicious “send off soup seconds.” Basil, bean, carrot, meat soupy stuff accompanied by a new type of ahí as well as more beans and more rice from the kitchen of plenty. Ka-bing!

Afterwards, we play around with the kids’ videos, getting ready for our gran exposición on Friday. Cross your fingers and toes.

Monday, 17 August 2009

Today is the big day to finally transfer the difficult art of French toast to the people here who all know how to cook so much more really well without recipes for much more complex things. They must think so poorly of foreigners. Our work with NGOs is put on hold for the time being and we put ourselves in the mindset of thanking some people who have been so kind to us and get to know them better.

Wake up at 6am to start with the pie crusts and the French toast. We make a less-sugar, with apples, cinnamon and oatmeal drink to accompany our breakfast. Chopped fruit and then pear yogurt on top. Delic.

Brooke kills her first mammal today. With her bare hands. When she gets back home, Bonzi’s next. Watch out! (Joking, joking!)

Now its time to prepare cuy (guinea pig) for the lunch at the house. We now have 2 simultaneous lunch invites for amazingly delicious food, but we´ll make it happen. We each kill 1 guinea pig. Well, first you have to catch it crawling around the pen. The mom worries we won´t know how to snap a neck here and there. She is really into speedy cooking, and snapping animals´ necks - something she said her grandma beat into her. Then we tried our hand at snapping a neck. The rodents kick and squirm, then go limp. And they have little rat-like teeth in front. Every time it was “our” turn to kill a cuy, mom grabs the thing from our hands and says, “ no no no. not like that, like this!” At least 3 cuyes go to cuy heaven like this. In the midst, a chicken is killed as well. We’re not sure if the grandma confused it with a cuy or if today is just killing-animals-day.

The grandma jokes and plays with the dead guinea pigs. She makes them dance and tells us that they will haunt us in our dreams. We got some decent footage. Then she goes after the cat and dogs pretending they are next. We got a decent picture.

Then the guinea pigs´ hair must be pulled out. You dip them straight into a boiling pot of water while holding the critters by their hind legs. Your fingers burn trying to take the hair off, and before you know it, you’re basically wearing a sweater of cuy. Then the little guys are cut open and their insides are taken out. The teeth get broken off with the blunt side of the knife, and basically all parts are kept for frying minus the intestines. Then the meat is cut into three pieces – the head, and two sides. Each piece is smothered in garlic and some onion and aji-no-moto and salt and pepper and then fried in bastante oil.

The meat is served with rice and potatoes and they have also made a Minestra soup to go with it. Minestra is a type of bean here. And the soup is made with a Basil base and corn and carrots and potatoes and parsley and large amount of spices. It is green.

Round two of our cooking is the planned lunch in the house of some friends. We come by with enough for 25. We make it. Its exciting. Turns out they are making a huge pot of Carapulcra con su sopa seca, which is much more difficult and time consuming than anything we’ve made today for our families.

Somehow we end up spending 2 hours chatting after and during eating our first lunch which was French toast and its fixings as well as carapulcra and sopa seca – 2 servings each. Then off to our family to enjoy our first cuy meal. We didn’t have to try. The meat is a bit skinny but its delicious. The best part is it cooked very much as is, so you eat the skin off the nails and eat the brain, the eyes. At the dinner table, half of us get heads and everyone gets half a cuy, fingernails and all. Unlike chicken legs, the little meaty pieces still have a bit of hair on them that tickles a bit as you munch away.

Lunch is great, and we are stuffed – more than any other day in Peru. We enjoy an open-faced pie with an excellent base made by Brooke via a recipe they had in the house and bananas and strawberries. She also put together a peach and apple pie that must be good but was left untouched after lunch in the house of our friends. Hopefully they enjoy it.

From there we have a meeting with a couple students to help them edit their videos. They are into fooling around with music more than editing so we don´t push them too hard and they don´t get much done. We rescheduled for tomorrow morning so we hope to get it done then.

These girls, along with two other participants accompanied us to poster the three neighborhoods directly around us. 10 posters. And Brooke made some nice ads for the class that can be handed out. This takes another 2 hours.

How does anything get done around here?

Speaking of which, upon returning home our family demands we eat dinner with them – eating and eating all day long.

Sunday, 16 August 2009

Monday, tomorrowish, we have set aside as the day we cook “American Food” for a handful of people we´ve gotten to know quite well during our time here. We figure this is a good opportunity to buy enough to cook for our family as well. French toast is the ironic choice of American food. We thought about adding crepes to the mix but threw that plan out when Juan went on a three minute explanation of how they make this great thing here and its made like a thin cake and they fry it then put fruits and sugar…

We also promised some fruit pies, and happen to really want to make some oatmeal cookies.

So the after breakfast hours were spent making the calculations for ingredients and creating a shopping list. Unfortunately we don´t know how to make pie crust so we had to look that up upon arrival in Ica. French toast is easy – Adam can do that. Pie crust is few ingredients, but cookies we have no real idea.

We run around for a couple hours in Ica and return with 1.5 kilos of strawberries, 25 bananas, 1 kilo of peaches, three 1 liter bottles of yogurt, .5 a kilo of limes, a lot of butter, 1.5 kilos of flour, molasses instead of syrup, a small pineapple, 2 kilos of apples.

That night we try our hand at cookie making. First ones taste like bread, then a bit like banana bread, then a sugar cookie and then we gave up – for a little while. Juan helped us out and he is a much more sophisticated eater than we are. He would tell us how badly we had made it, Brooke would try and guess how to change it to make it be more representative of a cookie, and Adam happily took advantage of the steady supply of cookies with unique tastes.

We got done late at night and bed.

15 Saturday August, 2009

For some reason, I can't get back to bed. Usually you just step outside to the bathroom, freeze while you're out in the wide open air (sheltered baño), and wipe your feet off at the door before crawling back into your appropriate heating “cacoon.” Don't get me wrong, this takes a lot of mental momentum to get the ball rolling from warm horizontal to cold vertical bodies. Because of the customs of downing a lot of hot-before-bed drinks, we are also accustomed to the urge to rise from a comfortable bed around 3 or 4 am. At first, the urge would beckon and our bodies would respond immediately. You are suddenly awake and have to contemplate the possibility of holding it until morning instead of making the intense weather shift now. But you ask your bladder who retorts with a little squeeze that makes you hop right out from between the covers. Now, our bodies know better than to bother us with something so unimportant, and we get to linger in the warmth uninterrupted until the morning.

But at 5:15, a shout comes through the hallway: “AGUA!” Which jolts us up and out. However, the normally intense water process of filling all the barrels around the house is calm this morning. It's here early so there's no rush to Juan isn't here so we don't have the skills or the knowledge to hook up the pump and pipes to the construction site downstream and into what appears to be a swimming pool. So Abuela just stands around with a hose, filling up haras that I didn't even know existed before today.

We jogged real quick. Some hills. Some flats. Some sprints. Right up until we had to be at the casita waiting for students to arrive with sleepy eyes. Originallly we had planned on Carlos, Pamela, Malu, Cecilia, and Elaine. Sin embargo Carlos was unable to get out of his job grading papers at the university, and Pamela had a mysterious presentation to take care of. So it ended up being just three students and us on our way in colectivo towards Ica. Elaine is 12, Cecilia is 14, and Malu is 26. A wide range of experience and perspective. They are psyched, brought their lunches to-go, and full of spunk. At the bus station, hurried hands push us towards our Flores flight into Pisco where the march will be this morning.

The march is about the lack of reconstruction in Pisco, the most affected town of the department. There's a large list of complaints.

“Para reforzar la seguridad ciudadana se cuentan 2.500 vehiculos nuevos, 5 mil computadoras, pero no hay comisaria en pisco, que hoy en el perú tiene 32 mil millones en reservas pero no hay plata para construir casas para los damnificados, que se han enregado mas de 560 mil titulos de propiedad, pero ninguno a los damnificados de pisco.” Are just a few of them. Basically, Peru's got money but none of it is going towards rebuilding Pisco. Or that what is being spent is being spent on the right things or in the right places.

The last time we were in Pisco, the highway into town from the Cruce was ripped up into pieces. Cars went on detour and bikes lucked out with a lovely little car-less ride to Pisco. We turn the corner and guess what? Partially paved, the 2^nd anniversary of the earthquake looks like a picturesquely progressing roadway. But our microbus only brings us so far because the rest of the tiny streets that would typically lead us in have been stripped of their pavement to install what looks like water systems. Our students immediately whip out their cameras. Malu narrates to the Flip, “We're here today in Pisco to see the march for reconstruction. As you can see here, the roads have been ripped up and many houses have yet to be repaired.” Cecilia and Elaine stick close together, basically taking video of the same thing.

The Plaza de Armas is swarming with marchers who don't seem to be working together. Isolated groups fighting for different things with different messages are circling the center statue shouting things about government, gas companies in the national reserve, and education. We filmed for a mere 20 or 30 minutes before the entire thing was over. Spectators covered every surface of the plaza, seated comfortably watching serenely. Malu, Cecilia, and Elaine ended up making a great team as one asked questions and the others stationed themselves taking two different shots of the interviewed. Afterwards, we ate lunch outside the Ceas church where the first mass was taking place in their new bamboo church. Everyone brought different lunches ranging from french fries, rice, fish, noodles, chicken, adobo, sweet potatoes, and even pallares. Afterwards, we circled around the plaza looking for more shots of the destruction/reconstruction and doing interviews with people who already have houses. And then... we took a taxi to San Andres to check out the beach, buy some fresh fish, and smell around for fresh bread. Right out of the taxi, we realize that no one is selling fish. So we walk into the butcher's shop to figure out the deal. There's a transportation strike today. We already knew this though, and it was just between Pisco and Chincha so no big deal. However, this means our family will be missing out on fruits from the sea.

Instead the girls squeal on over to the beach to collect shells and get sand in their socks. A lot.

Back to the Plaza de Armas to check out the action before we wrap up this field trip. There's not much going on though, so we continue onwards to the Cruce to buy our Soyuz ticket. But... there's a strike. And as far as the eye can see, there are cars buses trucks double deckers taximotos and people backed up. But we promised to get them home by 4 and it's past 3.

Taxi for 20 soles each? It only cost us 4 to get here! Okay, how about 10? Ummm... 45 for all five of you. And then our salvation of a combi comes. A bus that typically runs between San Clemenete and Pisco decides to reroute and take advantage of the strike by now doing runs between Pisco and Ica. 8 soles a piece. Not bad.

By the time we get back to Manco Capac, everyone is exhausted. But we have optional class today for consultations on editing and planning their final videos. We chilled for an hour with the family to let them know we're still alive. Adam ate a huge piece of cinnamon stick. Brooke inhaled some rice like there was no tomorrow. And we chatted about how sometimes eating things out of a mug is a really nice portion and feeling.

Then back to the casita where there is a game of volleyball happening. We split up, staking out the house and sending someone off to check on Pamela's formatting job. In the end, Adam plays volleyball while Brooke scribbles along with some students to make posters for our final event. Then we hit up the keepers of La Capilla (church) to see if we can get our foot in the door to host our event there. It's well known. It's not affiliated with any NGO. It's on the Manco Capac side. Unlike the Casita which is small, built by Aportes, yet central. We're not entirely sure how to get both communities to come to the same place. We'll consult Yngrid, our Aportes friend who is an expert on the locale.

Somehow, we get home where Juan has been waiting to eat. We tuck in food while watching a part of Girl with a Pearl Earring. Next stop: figure out a plan to stay awake while blogging at 10:30pm

14 Friday August, 2009

-Get water from well. Take amazing video shots.

-Do laundry while husking corn.

-Eat lunch of corn, think about how darn late it got.

-Talk with Carlos about his movie. Download and get shown up by his mad computer science skills.

-Chat and chat with the Woman's Group

-And we learn about some up and coming projects in an organizational meeting held by the president of Manco Capac

-Somehow, we end up with an interview on Sunday with a woman who knows what's what about Cáritas which is perfect.

-Pensively decide not to go to the midnight demonstration in Pisco

-Pensively decide instead to work late and hit up the blankets early

13 Thursday August, 2009

It's almost midnight, and here we are again, thinking about making oatmeal cookies. We bought a massive amount of oatmeal for the family this morning for making quaker as well as a bag of flour yesterday to make vegetable tortillas. However, we both blink our eyes and let our contacts slide as we stare down our respective computers doing our respective jobs of typing the blog and naming footage.

We just came back from our consultation hours with our students in the Casita. Pamela (our editing expert) came to simply come. We would have worked more with her footage, however we are short on a MPEG-2 converter that needs to be purchased from Mac since it is apparently patented by someone who probably never thought the technology would be needed right here and right now in Peru with these kids. Twenty bucks? Twenty BUCKS?! Really, people, apple is running a scam here making my OS obsolete every few years and taking all of my programs with it. iMovie is awful. So awful. So is the em-pehg-two formatting of our camera. Damn that camera.

Cecilia and her partner are there, but Malú is playing a game of volleyball where the stakes are high. Cincuenta centimes to each of the winners. However, Malú and Ceci have taking more shots since we met yesterday which indicates more progress towards their completed video.

Brahayan and Elaine, our youngest two students, are still at a stand-still and are super busy with school. We suggest that maybe they should join other groups, make their movie about something else, or take the footage from Pisco that we are going to be recording this upcoming Saturday to use for their raw inputs. This is all done as Adam hangs out a window and Brooke squats on the ground surrounded by four pensive students. They decide that maybe they should talk with their parents one more time to see if they can get one of them to say yes if we cover their tickets to and from Pisco. In any case, their message is to tell their community that they should be more united. Maybe if they show what’s happening in the Caserio Manco Capác and Señor de Luren compared to Pisco’s march, they can show that some places have come together to make a statement.

Staring at them play volleyball…

Before this, we had been crawling around the neighborhood at a record slow speed trying to do surveys. Adam’s idea was to do random encuestas around the town to see how fast the news of our class has been spreading, especially given the last assignment which involved people running around with their video cameras recording all that they could about the reconstruction. Our results is that although a majority of our class is from Manco Capác, only ¼ of our sample knew about the class. Señor de Luren (of which we technically have 1.5 students – one student has a house in each. One with her grandparents and the other with her mother) has a sample of 3/7s people who know about the class. We have yet to pin point whether distance from the Casita correlates to knowing about the class.

Before we do our encuestas though, we encounter a group of women cooking a very large pot (think the size of a pot that could boil Brooke whole) of what appears to be hot chocolate. Which it is. And it smells good. Vaso de Leche is a partially government funded organization that tries to make sure that every night, every kid gets a good glass of milk in them. The people are gathered around the pot, chatting as some of them lean over to push more wood under the Goliath. Just down the way, a few houses next door, there is another group of people who are just taking advantage of what’s left of the sun.

My forearms hurt from typing so much at once.

Before surveys, we were so lucky to encounter some homemade Chaunfainita boiling in a pot as we arrived from La Tinguiña where we were messing around with our Mac to see if we could get it working to transform MPEG2s to AVI. Additionally we rode our bikes there to enjoy the daily dose of tanning, dust-in-the-eyes, and exercise. We happened upon a bike repair shop at which we asked about prices to re-sell our well-used steeds.

We are old people and start falling sleep while typing at only 10:40 pm. A rooster crows. He is confused and sounds almost as if he is inside the house. Mostly because he is. At least, there is a window that opens to the house that is shared with his cage.

Our alarm went off around 4:50 this morning. We planned on working out before helping with the water. Instead, Adam managed to bench Brooke’s weight. Well, actually she crawled up in a ball and he just benched her. Then abuelita called us out of bed and onto our feet and into duty to distribute water from here to there and there and there. Today, we prepared too much food for the amount of people that are actually home and want to eat. In fact, we made so much that we couldn’t finish it for lunch or dinner. This morning: sweet potatoes, rice, tortillas of vegetable, hot chocolate, and bread with guanabana jelly inside. Then off to visit a little old lady and Pamela. One to interview about the history of Manco Capac and the other to check on some different formatting possibilities.

12 Wednesday August, 2009

Today was a day of should-have-beens. Instead of blogging, let me list the ways the day should have been. Then you can decide if our normative, idealistic thinking is out of line.

The water should have come today at 6:00 a.m. We were ready for it, even working out early so that we could be present for the fiasco. It wasn't here by 7. It wasn't here by 8. In fact, it never showed.
Gabe should have had a bus ticket for Cusco for 1:00, but instead he is delayed a few hours.
There should be some sort of written history or something existing on this place we're staying in, but there really isn't. We're finding this out slowly and painfully as we start to cross off all of our possible leads.
We should be doing surveys so that we can have some sort of raw data of demographics within the NGO information realm when we return. Instead, we are invited to play soccer and volleyball.
This blog should be longer, but we are running out of words in both languages to describe our experience.

The end.

11 Tuesday August, 2009

Today we are scheduled to visit every single one of our students. One-by-one. We have 8 active students. We have a 75% success rate of encountering our class. We just miss out on 2 people. One because it is too late and the other because he lives too far away. The entire process is very complicated because

A. People live in different neighborhoods

B. Have different schedules depending on what grade they're in (Some go to school in the morning, others in the afternoon, and others in the noche).

C. People are in different stages of their videos (and of their lives)

D. Depending on their age, they have very different thinking capacities for imagining how the final project will be and what steps are needed to move towards it.

E. We have to talk to them about several things. The editing process, our fieldtrip to Pisco on Saturday, fixing the final dates for our screening, and a class evaluation. Not only do they have to fill it out, they also need to respond to a camera with their answers for the evaluation.

In our first pass, Malu is busy. Come back at 3. Our second pass uncovers something incredible: an edited video that includes several (if not all of the) takes from our Connect4 scavenger hunt. Pamela has already completed her homework of having a draft put together. She has a twenty minute video that she and Yubi worked on for two hours to put together within two days of having shot the footage. Her turn over is amazing. Unfortunately, her plot seems rather random, her footage is still intact (as in, she left every take whole) without sacking the useless information within each take, and the entire thing is incredibly long for saying very little. Let's take a step back: second video of intent and message that she's ever done. Therefore, we are on a roll. With a little more planning and thought, her editing skills can be put to good use to throw together something quick for the final screening. We tell her that maybe her video can stand as a backbone for the other videos since she has the capacity to import several videos as well as stitch them together in a fairly timely fashion. This would be ideal seeing as we would like to consider it THEIR video rather than a collaboration between us and the students. We sort of leave a few questions for her to ask herself and Yubi: what do you want your message to be? Who is this message to? What point of view do you have that no one else in your community has? And after 2 hours, we leave. Side note: we also find out that it is going to be innnnnnncredibly difficult to change our flight tickets. Difficult like a couple thousand dollars difficult. Right. No.

Next comes Malu. We ask her to take a look at what takes she already has and to choose the shots that she thinks best relate to her message and audience. She picks up on our game quickly and SNAP! Lika flash of light, she is rearranging small index cards to set up a storyboard for her footage. She fills in some blanks and decides that she'll take this footage later. We say ALRIGHT! And that we'll pass the message onto her project partner etc etc. Her message? That there is a lot of work from the NGOs here, none from the government, and that the help has been a lot but not enough to really bring things back to par. She also wants to point out that in a lot of cases, there are people receiving aid who don't need it but are in favor of a government or friends with someone on the ladder. Points for Malu.

Then we hit up Brahayan (sounds like Bryan) to shoot the sand. His message is unclear. His grandmother talks to us a lot about witches who used to live here. His footage is apparently insufficient to create anything of significance, and he is out of ideas. Soooo we say that we'll talk to his project partner to check if she's got some things to say and get back to ,him.

Then we play duck duck goose with the rest of our students. Elaine isn't there. Cecilia is, but she has to get all dolled up before she can meet with Malu. We have ten minutes to bring her back before it gets dark. Go. The group talks. Elaine isn't there. We try to convince Cecilia's mom that the field trip will be a great lesson. Cecilia goes back home. Elaine is there, but now Bryan can't meet cause it's too late. And then there's Alison. But it's too dark and she has to think and Carlos and her can't meet until Friday any ways so then we decide that we should just head back home cause it's late and no one probably wants to talk to us anymore cause we're always on their cases. Or something like that.

Oh yeah, then we went to bed.

10 Monday August, 2009

This morning we wake up with three things on our mind: climbing high mountains, forging wide rivers, and trekking through low valleys. Okay, actually only climbing mountains and going into Ica to deal with more bureaucracy to slowly and painfully extract small snippets of information from the government and other institutions. Since Gabe is only going to be here for a few days, we decide to show him a good time by forcing him to climb a nearby mountain for a few hours while we peacefully slumber behind him in a cart that he struggles to hoist up the side of the steep slopes of the cerro. Simultaneously, we are also slashing through the city of Ica trashing all the offices we encounter.

The view from the mountain top still lurks in the back of our minds like an unforgettable smile of a friend. There is abundant amounts of fake gold glimmering on the surfaces of the sand dunes, collecting in the pockets between rocks where they are tucked away from the gusts of winds near the peak. Our backs have been blessed with sunshine and beautiful weather as we lift our knees más y más arriba. We are only accompanied by carrots, water, and a GPS we never bothered to turn on. On the way down, we notice the people working in the field like small mechanized dots of Braille trying to communicate a secret message to towards space. They move slowly to reorganize and make new shapes, sometimes.

Meanwhile in Ica, Adam meets with Cáritas reps who have a little bit of verbal info on Manco Cápac. It is made clear to them that we are only after information about the town that they have gathered but they just want to talk about how they have built many homes there and how the people were really forgotten until they came and rescued them. We got contact info for someone from their office who knows more about the background data, so hopefully we can get in touch with her. At the Regional Government office we successfully complete the next step towards obtaining any data that they have over that region, data that we assume is quite useless. They politely show us the information on a CD, taunting us, and go on to explain that it will take at least 4 visits in person, wearing pants, to get the information we need. This is the second. F public beauracracy.

PNUD was the other major stop. Contrary to what an email we had received from them had said, they have no info on this tiny place. The person who had sent the email was not around and was not answering her phone so it might be she knows something the others (and us) don´t.

Then batteries for the FlipCams. Only a few more since we don´t want to go overboard. Then water for the bloodstream. Then yogurt for the salad, pine and apple we are going to make for breakfast tomorrow. Some spinach. Lots of hot peppers and try and head back before lunchtime.

We reunite after some hours of this glorious intake of fresh air, across the dry garbage-filled river, and back into our home for lunch. Edwin, who only slept a mere 2.33 hours a previous night, was still in good spirits. Him and his daughter danced to the songs of Mariachis while abuelita served our plates. Recently we have no choice about the portions of the plates so they end up much larger than what we’re capable of eating. Today was a mystery mixture of something green with meat, corn, potatoes topped with a side of rice. Sudado, they call it. Some apple water and cinnamon water to add the finishing touches, and we’re all in food comas.

We have decided that since we have yet to encounter much written information about Caserio Macho Capác and Señor de Luren, we will go out and do our own survey to collect our invaluable information about the history of the town and how it came to be. We meet someone who claims that he has been here since the 1930s. He hardly looks like he could be 50. There were also recounts of the agrarian reform that happened about twenty years back, or in 1974 depending on who we choose to believe. From what we could determine from the surveys that we did today is the following; the land used to be untouched. Then there were large parcels of land that would place their farms and their homes. Here, they stayed until they were slowly put out of their work or lost portions of their farms by land-grabbers. During this time, a few families moved towards the Achirana river and became the first settlers of Manco Cápac. One of these first settlers was named De La Cruz. Then comes the reform. Then comes Viña Tacama. We ask about the education, try to get a feel for the general demographic, and listen to whatever else they want to talk about. Some mechanics tell us about how we can do a day of work like a typical campesino here. He says that he wouldn’t recommend it for women especially since you have to carry a bag of 120 kilograms up a ramp to harvest papas here.

After this, we return home to confirm all our findings, eat dinner, upload and organize interview footage, plan for the meetings we have set up for the students (we agreed to seek out each and every student to give them info during the week and hear from them since this is the first week of school and the kids are more busy than usual), and find our ways to bed.

9 Sunday August, 2009

Buenos Dias to the morning run.

Today’s class doesn’t start until 4pm, but we have a full schedule in front of us. You know, the usual metaphysical transformation from human beings into tubes. The typical wake up in the morning and grinding of toasted corn for the normal breakfast drink. The leaving of the family’s most valuable watch dog in an unfamiliar neighborhood with the chance of being totally and utterly destroyed by several other mangy, thick-haired mutts while we run back towards the house as he is entirely helpless to move without setting off a never-ending alarm of howls, barks, and growls unless he does it quickly enough that his four legs will carry him faster than any of the other 40 legs that are careening around his adrenaline filled body ready to attack. Somehow, we ended up in a new part of town with Pirata during our morning run. And somehow, we managed to leave Pirata behind with what-might-have-been-a-few-other-angry-looking dogs. But only sort of. So Adam said, don’t worry guys! I’ll go back and get him.

So then we ran back to the house where we eagerly awaited the arrival of Adam … without Pirata. That’s right folks, without Pirata. Emergency response! Sirens! Man the bikes! Stop cooking breakfast! We must recover our most prized pet! Long story short, he is very capable of taking care of himself and returned with a big smile to top off his cantering tip toes.

We try to help with breakfast, but abuelita has her stuff down pat. She takes pity on Gabe though and hands him a knife to spread jam on little sandwiches. She probably does this a lot with us in the kitchen. It must be painful to watch us peel potatoes so clumsily when she is deft enough with her agile fingers that man a knife to the skin of the vegetable without even looking at what’s she’s doing. When our mouths drop at her feat, she just laughs and asks what we’re so amazed by. Obviously, the entire time she is staring us in the eyes. So we head into the room to make a worksheet for today’s class.

After Adam returns from hours of toning his muscles to perfection, we take off for a thirty minute bike ride into La Tinguiña in order to use a computer connected to a printer, connected to a floor, connected to a sidewalk, connected to fresh air, connected to a tienda, connected to a copy machine which spits out 14 copies for us to bring back to the Caserio. Gabe checks up on getting his butt out and about to Macchu Picchu. Then we hit up the market to bring back nummies for the family. Pineapple and Bananas. We divine that while we are gone, Adam is probably chopping wood. And we get back, he totally had been chopping wood.

But upon our arrival, we encounter nothing but sheepish smiles of Adam, abuelita, and Edwin who are seated in a shady, quiet dining room. The table is filled with plates. Those plates are filled with absolutely nothing. Miss Peacock with the candlestick in the library! Ariana is in the corner sleeping soundly, and we try to mask the sounds of our bellies rumbling as we sneak past. Delicious wheat popped looking rice smoosh. And rice. And soup. But this wheat stuff seems like it might be quinoa, but it’s not. And there are spices. And our tongues need to be shoved back in our mouths before they stay out for good like your mother warned you would happen if you crossed your eyes and got hit on the back. But we always get our fill of food in this house. And for that, we are thankful.

Afterwards, we do surveys. It’s like a rite of passage for any of our visitors. If you wanna hang with us, you gotta pass the test of hitting up every house of the neighborhood we be livin in at the time. And listen to stories you might not understand. And possible be put to the task of holding a camera. Oh, so is life. But Gabe handles himself well, taking perfectly (obviously) framed shots along the way. Figures, him being an architecture major with a concentration in film. Someone’s gotta have the eye here. We meet the president of the Comedor. We talk to nice people. We find out that even if you live across the street from dozens of Aportes houses, there’s a high possibility that you don’t know their name. We find out that the word Broccoli is easier to pronounce that Brooke’s name. Someone gave Aportes a 20 outta 20 which indicates they’re outta this world. Oh, and we find another NGO. That was big. Well, it’s a church. El Shaddai, the evangelical one that Juan attends, has been the entry point for many of churches from the Untied States and many other countries. Juan also says (as we type) that on the fourth day, trucks showed up with blankets, jackets, and water. But the work happening now to build these anti-seismic brick models has been founded by these foreign churches as well as constructed with their help. Oh, and Pirata got into two more fights where he was out-numbered. But as expected, he remains unscathed and smugly victorious.

In class, we saw the results. Apparently, according to Adam’s theory, it doesn’t matter who you are. If you have a camera, it becomes your face. It is in the mind of the people. Where will this footage go. Why are people interested in my opinion. Who else is going to see what I say in this very moment. I think I need to choose my words very carefully and make sure not to step on the nails that are surely just around the corner. And this is how they came out. Personal opinion, the most interesting shots were from the prompt, “where is the place that most represents your town to you, why?” We got more varied responses for this one than the others. But there were many houses demonstrated to the camera as the icon of the word “reconstruction.” There were many thank yous to the NGOs. There were many many shots of the church in Manco Capác. We also talk about dates for our last class and screening, ask them to think about, and discuss going to Pisco for the earthquake’s anniversary. Any of us “professors” would have been sound asleep after two and half hours of this sort of fooling around if we had been students in our students’ shoes.

And they were cool with the assignment. In fact, they ran out into the streets immediately after receiving it to go ask people about their opinions about NGOs. They even seemed determined to make funny videos of each other dancing and singing about NGOs. A boring topic turned on its head by simple competition. But what we find out is that there are many people who will decline to be interviewed and many more with mouthfuls of positive, non-constructive things to say. In short, we might have been able to get better footage than they did simply because we knew what sorts of questions to ask from our previous practice. But people would decline to be interviewed because they thought we were with an NGO (and why wouldn’t they since we are teaching in a community center put up by an NGO?). Unfortunately, they seemed more interested in just checking off the squares as tasks to complete rather than thoughts to think in. Of course, there were the exceptions, but for the most part, the footage was endlessly familiar shots of people saying thank you or that the earthquake was “very very bad.” But nothing more of detail.

Delicious food as always for dinner and then back into bed for another few hours before the early morning calls us.

8 Saturuday August, 2009

“Apple Ops¨

Sprint workouts are shorter and more fun – but sand is slow. Pecks and triceps day put the cherry on top of the cake.

Our class today starts at 5pm. We have also committed to having office hours open to the students from 2 to 5pm., so we need to eat lunch before then – easier blogged than done. Lunch is a guiso of this new vegetable thing so no one wants to leave without fully enjoying that.

We make it over there though, and no one really shows up until 4pm – kinda what we expected. This gives us time to dedicate to brainstorming and discussing how our project in general is going and think about how we might shape our documentary. We spend an hour or so discussing how we see our trip playing in, our personal travel, into the documentary. Malu shows up at 4:15pm to show us her video showing a typical morning in her life. As we sit down to watch her shots and put them into a quick video, she sits down with a few sheets of paper and draws out a post-filming story board. We let her know this is totally not necessary, especially since storyboarding is meant to be a planning tool, but she sheds our advice, saying she likes to draw.

Cool.

Speaking of cool, Malu´s shots are done incredibly well. She apologizes for not being able to film her dad, saying he broke a rib yesterday and is in the hospital. We´re pretty sure her video skills of placement of camera to film herself were put to good use, tho. In short, she caught us off-guard with how well done her shots were. She had a great shot of her sweeping, then the whole process of making a sopa a la minuta (soup) starting a wood fire (personal favorite), filling it with water, chopping up vegetables and then of course a bowl of the finished product.

Backtracking before lunch, Adam plays with bikes and tools, and Brooke spends the time printing off things for the class – we´ve made a Connect 4 game/worksheet for the kids in which they have to do at least 4 of the 16 filming options we made up for them. Each of these tasks had something to do with NGOs or reconstruction, etc. Basically this was our way of testing the waters to gauge their interest in this whole NGO evaluation thing using youth participatory video. Will they be cool with it? Will they like/enjoy it? Will the community be overwhelmed by it? Will they find out things we couldn´t have found ourselves? Will they learn new things about these topics that will pique their interest? Will they be interested in the topics or in the prizes more? (Yes we are giving them prizes – our assumption is we should ease them into the more boring/academic topic of interviewing using questions centered on NGOs).

Anyways, the kids take it in stride. They totally seem to be into it, we think, we guess, we hope. The three prizes we set up are for:

1. The most interesting/informative

2. The most artistic

3. The most different filming options completed

4. The most fun

We take input for what prizes the students would like and this was a list of some responses:

Chanfaina (soupy potatoes and meat and vegetable dish)

Soda

Chocalate cake with Pecans

Chocotejas (chocalatey pecans)

Sweet breads

We´ll see what we end up deciding – we told them we would decide by next Thursday.

While the kids run around interviewing and planning for how they will complete their connect 4, one of us chases behind different pairs and films them. And then there is the filming option of filming some other group doing their task. So, basically at any given time, there might be 3 or more cameras all filming in a circle.

Are we using the kids? Are we misusing the kids?

And suddenly Gabe showed up. He found his own way to our house and from there was led down to the schoolhouse. Chilling, he meets the kids as they return from there scavenger hunt. Then we sit down to critique their films on their “typical day in the life of..”. Gabe integrates in smoothly and begins offering critique right away. Meanwhile a couple teenage girls in the corner begin sneaking video of Gabe, giggling. When we ask them what they are doing they turn as red as Peruvian girls can get and claim to not be doing anything. Sure…

After class, we head home for dinner. Everyone has eaten already since we are coming back so late. We split up the food and chow down, settle Gabe in a bit, exchange life-altering accounts of daily life, organize footage, draw a bit, and blog.

2009-08-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

Leirbag

2009-08-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

10 Monday August, 2009

"Gold! And there! And more! We´re rich, don´t tell the others"

This morning we wake up with three things on our mind: climbing high mountains, forging wide rivers, and trekking through low valleys. Okay, actually only climbing mountains and going into Ica to deal with more bureaucracy to slowly and painfully extract small snippets of information from the government and other institutions. Since Gabe is only going to be here for a few days, we decide to show him a good time by forcing him to climb a nearby mountain for a few hours while we peacefully slumber behind him in a cart that he struggles to hoist up the side of the steep slopes of the cerro. Simultaneously, we are also slashing through the city of Ica trashing all the offices we encounter.

The view from the mountain top still lurks in the back of our minds like an unforgettable smile of a friend. There is abundant amounts of fake gold glimmering on the surfaces of the sand dunes, collecting in the pockets between rocks where they are tucked away from the gusts of winds near the peak. Our backs have been blessed with sunshine and beautiful weather as we lift our knees más y más arriba. We are only accompanied by carrots, water, and a GPS we never bothered to turn on. On the way down, we notice the people working in the field like small mechanized dots of Braille trying to communicate a secret message to towards space. They move slowly to reorganize and make new shapes, sometimes.

Meanwhile in Ica, Adam meets with Cáritas reps who have a little bit of verbal info on Manco Cápac. It is made clear to them that we are only after information about the town that they have gathered but they just want to talk about how they have built many homes there and how the people were really forgotten until they came and rescued them. We got contact info for someone from their office who knows more about the background data, so hopefully we can get in touch with her. At the Regional Government office we successfully complete the next step towards obtaining any data that they have over that region, data that we assume is quite useless. They politely show us the information on a CD, taunting us, and go on to explain that it will take at least 4 visits in person, wearing pants, to get the information we need. This is the second. F public beauracracy.

PNUD was the other major stop. Contrary to what an email we had received from them had said, they have no info on this tiny place. The person who had sent the email was not around and was not answering her phone so it might be she knows something the others (and us) don´t.

Then batteries for the FlipCams. Only a few more since we don´t want to go overboard. Then water for the bloodstream. Then yogurt for the salad, pine and apple we are going to make for breakfast tomorrow. Some spinach. Lots of hot peppers and try and head back before lunchtime.

We reunite after some hours of this glorious intake of fresh air, across the dry garbage-filled river, and back into our home for lunch. Edwin, who only slept a mere 2.33 hours a previous night, was still in good spirits. Him and his daughter danced to the songs of Mariachis while abuelita served our plates. Recently we have no choice about the portions of the plates so they end up much larger than what we’re capable of eating. Today was a mystery mixture of something green with meat, corn, potatoes topped with a side of rice. Sudado, they call it. Some apple water and cinnamon water to add the finishing touches, and we’re all in food comas.

We have decided that since we have yet to encounter much written information about Caserio Macho Capác and Señor de Luren, we will go out and do our own survey to collect our invaluable information about the history of the town and how it came to be. We meet someone who claims that he has been here since the 1930s. He hardly looks like he could be 50. There were also recounts of the agrarian reform that happened about twenty years back, or in 1974 depending on who we choose to believe. From what we could determine from the surveys that we did today is the following; the land used to be untouched. Then there were large parcels of land that would place their farms and their homes. Here, they stayed until they were slowly put out of their work or lost portions of their farms by land-grabbers. During this time, a few families moved towards the Achirana river and became the first settlers of Manco Cápac. One of these first settlers was named De La Cruz. Then comes the reform. Then comes Viña Tacama. We ask about the education, try to get a feel for the general demographic, and listen to whatever else they want to talk about. Some mechanics tell us about how we can do a day of work like a typical campesino here. He says that he wouldn’t recommend it for women especially since you have to carry a bag of 120 kilograms up a ramp to harvest papas here.

After this, we return home to confirm all our findings, eat dinner, upload and organize interview footage, plan for the meetings we have set up for the students (we agreed to seek out each and every student to give them info during the week and hear from them since this is the first week of school and the kids are more busy than usual), and find our ways to bed.

9 Sunday August, 2009
"That breakfast was amazing."

Hola water. Hola sun. Hola sand in my shoe. Hola dogs in the streets. Hola people looking at three kids running with a pit bull. Hola dust in my eyes. Hola cramp in my belly. Hola beautiful mountain view. Hola legs.

Buenos Dias to the morning run.

Today’s class doesn’t start until 4pm, but we have a full schedule in front of us. You know, the usual metaphysical transformation from human beings into tubes. The typical wake up in the morning and grinding of toasted corn for the normal breakfast drink. The leaving of the family’s most valuable watch dog in an unfamiliar neighborhood with the chance of being totally and utterly destroyed by several other mangy, thick-haired mutts while we run back towards the house as he is entirely helpless to move without setting off a never-ending alarm of howls, barks, and growls unless he does it quickly enough that his four legs will carry him faster than any of the other 40 legs that are careening around his adrenaline filled body ready to attack. Somehow, we ended up in a new part of town with Pirata during our morning run. And somehow, we managed to leave Pirata behind with what-might-have-been-a-few-other-angry-looking dogs. But only sort of. So Adam said, don’t worry guys! I’ll go back and get him.

So then we ran back to the house where we eagerly awaited the arrival of Adam … without Pirata. That’s right folks, without Pirata. Emergency response! Sirens! Man the bikes! Stop cooking breakfast! We must recover our most prized pet! Long story short, he is very capable of taking care of himself and returned with a big smile to top off his cantering tip toes.

We try to help with breakfast, but abuelita has her stuff down pat. She takes pity on Gabe though and hands him a knife to spread jam on little sandwiches. She probably does this a lot with us in the kitchen. It must be painful to watch us peel potatoes so clumsily when she is deft enough with her agile fingers that man a knife to the skin of the vegetable without even looking at what’s she’s doing. When our mouths drop at her feat, she just laughs and asks what we’re so amazed by. Obviously, the entire time she is staring us in the eyes. So we head into the room to make a worksheet for today’s class.

After Adam returns from hours of toning his muscles to perfection, we take off for a thirty minute bike ride into La Tinguiña in order to use a computer connected to a printer, connected to a floor, connected to a sidewalk, connected to fresh air, connected to a tienda, connected to a copy machine which spits out 14 copies for us to bring back to the Caserio. Gabe checks up on getting his butt out and about to Macchu Picchu. Then we hit up the market to bring back nummies for the family. Pineapple and Bananas. We divine that while we are gone, Adam is probably chopping wood. And we get back, he totally had been chopping wood.

But upon our arrival, we encounter nothing but sheepish smiles of Adam, abuelita, and Edwin who are seated in a shady, quiet dining room. The table is filled with plates. Those plates are filled with absolutely nothing. Miss Peacock with the candlestick in the library! Ariana is in the corner sleeping soundly, and we try to mask the sounds of our bellies rumbling as we sneak past. Delicious wheat popped looking rice smoosh. And rice. And soup. But this wheat stuff seems like it might be quinoa, but it’s not. And there are spices. And our tongues need to be shoved back in our mouths before they stay out for good like your mother warned you would happen if you crossed your eyes and got hit on the back. But we always get our fill of food in this house. And for that, we are thankful.

Afterwards, we do surveys. It’s like a rite of passage for any of our visitors. If you wanna hang with us, you gotta pass the test of hitting up every house of the neighborhood we be livin in at the time. And listen to stories you might not understand. And possible be put to the task of holding a camera. Oh, so is life. But Gabe handles himself well, taking perfectly (obviously) framed shots along the way. Figures, him being an architecture major with a concentration in film. Someone’s gotta have the eye here. We meet the president of the Comedor. We talk to nice people. We find out that even if you live across the street from dozens of Aportes houses, there’s a high possibility that you don’t know their name. We find out that the word Broccoli is easier to pronounce that Brooke’s name. Someone gave Aportes a 20 outta 20 which indicates they’re outta this world. Oh, and we find another NGO. That was big. Well, it’s a church. El Shaddai, the evangelical one that Juan attends, has been the entry point for many of churches from the Untied States and many other countries. Juan also says (as we type) that on the fourth day, trucks showed up with blankets, jackets, and water. But the work happening now to build these anti-seismic brick models has been founded by these foreign churches as well as constructed with their help. Oh, and Pirata got into two more fights where he was out-numbered. But as expected, he remains unscathed and smugly victorious.

In class, we saw the results. Apparently, according to Adam’s theory, it doesn’t matter who you are. If you have a camera, it becomes your face. It is in the mind of the people. Where will this footage go. Why are people interested in my opinion. Who else is going to see what I say in this very moment. I think I need to choose my words very carefully and make sure not to step on the nails that are surely just around the corner. And this is how they came out. Personal opinion, the most interesting shots were from the prompt, “where is the place that most represents your town to you, why?” We got more varied responses for this one than the others. But there were many houses demonstrated to the camera as the icon of the word “reconstruction.” There were many thank yous to the NGOs. There were many many shots of the church in Manco Capác. We also talk about dates for our last class and screening, ask them to think about, and discuss going to Pisco for the earthquake’s anniversary. Any of us “professors” would have been sound asleep after two and half hours of this sort of fooling around if we had been students in our students’ shoes.

And they were cool with the assignment. In fact, they ran out into the streets immediately after receiving it to go ask people about their opinions about NGOs. They even seemed determined to make funny videos of each other dancing and singing about NGOs. A boring topic turned on its head by simple competition. But what we find out is that there are many people who will decline to be interviewed and many more with mouthfuls of positive, non-constructive things to say. In short, we might have been able to get better footage than they did simply because we knew what sorts of questions to ask from our previous practice. But people would decline to be interviewed because they thought we were with an NGO (and why wouldn’t they since we are teaching in a community center put up by an NGO?). Unfortunately, they seemed more interested in just checking off the squares as tasks to complete rather than thoughts to think in. Of course, there were the exceptions, but for the most part, the footage was endlessly familiar shots of people saying thank you or that the earthquake was “very very bad.” But nothing more of detail.

Delicious food as always for dinner and then back into bed for another few hours before the early morning calls us.

8 Saturday August, 2009
“Apple Ops¨

Sprint workouts are shorter and more fun – but sand is slow. Pecks and triceps day put the cherry on top of the cake.

Our class today starts at 5pm. We have also committed to having office hours open to the students from 2 to 5pm., so we need to eat lunch before then – easier blogged than done. Lunch is a guiso of this new vegetable thing so no one wants to leave without fully enjoying that.

We make it over there though, and no one really shows up until 4pm – kinda what we expected. This gives us time to dedicate to brainstorming and discussing how our project in general is going and think about how we might shape our documentary. We spend an hour or so discussing how we see our trip playing in, our personal travel, into the documentary. Malu shows up at 4:15pm to show us her video showing a typical morning in her life. As we sit down to watch her shots and put them into a quick video, she sits down with a few sheets of paper and draws out a post-filming story board. We let her know this is totally not necessary, especially since storyboarding is meant to be a planning tool, but she sheds our advice, saying she likes to draw.

Cool.

Speaking of cool, Malu´s shots are done incredibly well. She apologizes for not being able to film her dad, saying he broke a rib yesterday and is in the hospital. We´re pretty sure her video skills of placement of camera to film herself were put to good use, tho. In short, she caught us off-guard with how well done her shots were. She had a great shot of her sweeping, then the whole process of making a sopa a la minuta (soup) starting a wood fire (personal favorite), filling it with water, chopping up vegetables and then of course a bowl of the finished product.

Backtracking before lunch, Adam plays with bikes and tools, and Brooke spends the time printing off things for the class – we´ve made a Connect 4 game/worksheet for the kids in which they have to do at least 4 of the 16 filming options we made up for them. Each of these tasks had something to do with NGOs or reconstruction, etc. Basically this was our way of testing the waters to gauge their interest in this whole NGO evaluation thing using youth participatory video. Will they be cool with it? Will they like/enjoy it? Will the community be overwhelmed by it? Will they find out things we couldn´t have found ourselves? Will they learn new things about these topics that will pique their interest? Will they be interested in the topics or in the prizes more? (Yes we are giving them prizes – our assumption is we should ease them into the more boring/academic topic of interviewing using questions centered on NGOs).

Anyways, the kids take it in stride. They totally seem to be into it, we think, we guess, we hope. The three prizes we set up are for:
1. The most interesting/informative
2. The most artistic
3. The most different filming options completed
4. The most fun

We take input for what prizes the students would like and this was a list of some responses:
Chanfaina (soupy potatoes and meat and vegetable dish)
Soda
Chocalate cake with Pecans
Chocotejas (chocalatey pecans)
Sweet breads

We´ll see what we end up deciding – we told them we would decide by next Thursday.

While the kids run around interviewing and planning for how they will complete their connect 4, one of us chases behind different pairs and films them. And then there is the filming option of filming some other group doing their task. So, basically at any given time, there might be 3 or more cameras all filming in a circle.

Are we using the kids? Are we misusing the kids?

And suddenly Gabe showed up. He found his own way to our house and from there was led down to the schoolhouse. Chilling, he meets the kids as they return from there scavenger hunt. Then we sit down to critique their films on their “typical day in the life of..”. Gabe integrates in smoothly and begins offering critique right away. Meanwhile a couple teenage girls in the corner begin sneaking video of Gabe, giggling. When we ask them what they are doing they turn as red as Peruvian girls can get and claim to not be doing anything. Sure…

After class, we head home for dinner. Everyone has eaten already since we are coming back so late. We split up the food and chow down, settle Gabe in a bit, exchange life-altering accounts of daily life, organize footage, draw a bit, and blog.

Oopsie Daisies

2009-08-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

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.

My Flash Recovery

2009-08-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

Sunday, August 2

Stay Pirata. Pirata, get out of my way! Leave the chickens alone, Pirata. Chew on this chunk of adobe, Pirata. Le tiré una piedra a Pirata y se entretuvo. Pirata doesn’t let you do pull-ups without sacrificing your shoes and lower legs to scratch posts. Pirata, sal de la clase! Quítate de aquí, Pirata! Pirata no nos deja ir solos a ningún lugar. Les vi a Uds dos corriendo con Pirata por la mañana. Pirata, deja al otro Pirata y sal de ahí!

Pirata, as earlier posts give away, is the most outgoing and protective of our 3 host dogs. He goes everywhere with us and eats rocks and adobe blocks in his free time. He gets in the face of any dog he sees on the street and will enter any room to follow us, even if it is our classroom and he is doing it for the 300th time. Because of him and because of Betsy, the little diabla next door, we have resorted to closing the front door of the classroom.

Running in the fresh of the farms this morning to the tune of 33 minutes and 46 seconds. 20 minutes of exercise on the jungle gym to top it off. Usual push-ups, ab workouts, pull-ups were supplemented by rookie appearances of adobe blocks as shoulder dumbbells, and old car tires loaded with rocks for bicep workouts.

Our first appointment of the day is as visitors to Juan´s church in the center of Ica at 10:30 am. This gives us time to wash a few shirts, make a to-do list and a shopping list, and have a breakfast of black lentils, rice, leftover drink of maíz tostado molido, bread and butter, as well as lechuga. As Da Vinci once said: “That was one of my favorite breakfasts yet.”

El Shaddai is Juan´s church, and it happens to be in a very nice part of town, nearby many of the NGOs and the United Nations office. It feels different finding ourselves there, without cameras (ok we brought a flipcam) doing real life instead of investigating and running around doing interviews. Its Christian and very modern in its style. Juan affectionately calls it: “Un escandolo, pura fiesta!” (Scandolous, all partying). Brooke says it familiar. Adam says the demographic of the church is interesting – all Peruvian run and made up of what seem to be many middle class to upper class residents of Ica. Juan is neither, but seems to have established himself as a leader within the church for his unabashed expression of his love for Jesus.

On the ride to church he used the analogy of a clogged gas filter to preach to the moto taxi driver. Later, over dinner he recounted how he has been fortunate enough to have debated religion with Peruvian leaders of all 12 religions present in the country. Bahaii is not one of them, and Adam would like it recorded that he has met with a Bahaii who claims they have a decent presence in this country. Anyways, Juan goes into depth about religion muchas veces. And watches preachers on TV all the time. No one else in the family joins in except the mom and dad sometimes with agreeing statements.

Church ran from 10:45am to 1:25pm. We split up with Juan to withdraw cash from downtown, as well as pick up 32 more AA batteries for the kids´ (ages 14-28) flipcams, make copies of a new storyboard example, update the blog, buy plaintains and milk for our family, and splurge on $1.30 worth of ice cream.

By the time we got back to Señor de Luren, where the classroom is, it was 3:20pm. Class started at 4pm so we set about setting everything up. Luz María next door needs to called out to open up the place since she holds the only key to the place. The TV needs to be borrowed from the house across the canal. The extension cord needs to be strung to another house across the canal. The table needs to be rearranged for TV viewing ease. The chairs need to be set out, as well as the tables for the computer for uploading and the TV. The video camera needs to be set up on a tripod to film the class. Today, we arrive early enough to set it up to catch students as they walk in the door. The white board needs to be filled with the schedule for the day and the homeworks for tomorrow. The printouts need to be set out for the kids to grab as they come in. Ok, so I understand real teachers are used to all this but for us it takes a bit of time, besides I actually don’t think teachers have to deal with borrowing all kinds of stuff before hand to make sure the class takes place.

It’s a good sign when you have students showing up early (i.e. within the first 10 mins past the set time). Especially if they show up earlier than they did last time. We had 4 students by 4:08pm. Its even cooler when you see one of those kids running to class with a new notebook. His name is Brahayan, and he is 14. Rocio shows up briefly to let us know she is in charge of caring for some visitors and has to run back and forth between the class and her house to make sure they are taken care of. Impressive. Jimmy, who didn´t show up last time, makes an entrance with last classes homework done in precise style. By 4:25pm we have 8 students, 1 we have yet to see past the intro class, and the other is taking her entrance exams to get into university.

Sundays must be good days, cuz the students seem to get more and more into critiquing each others´ work. Many brought notebooks and writing utensils to take notes. After catching everyone up to speed, we watch the interviews on history of their town that the students brought in. Amazyingly, many of them did a great job without even trying. One of them interviewed her Grandparents and accidentally aligned them both in the shot appropriately. More than that they were discussing the lack of reconstruction and the difference between before the earthquake and now. Apparently by accident the background was half brick from the new home built for them by an NGO and the other half temporary housing they still live in due to the small size of their NGO-donated home. Another films his great aunt who was one of the founders of the town. She discusses how the place came to be named Manco Cápac. She is very old. In the background is a clock that reads 10:25pm and ticks later as the video progresses. This clock sits on an old piece of furniture. Another interview frames a neighbor peering over his wooden fence as he discusses how the upper part of town invaded the lower part and took political control some 30 odd years ago. Turns out taking advantage of excluded groups occurs locally on some scale as well as on any other level of society.

From the interviews we move into introducing storyboarding. Storyboarding is basically rough planning for your video – a process which consists of drawing scenes as comic snapshots and explaining below details on the shot. This skill is especially useful when using the flipcams since it allows one to film an entire video in order since you have already planned everything out. We expect them to be normal people and take some time to get used to it – as in weeks or at least a couple classes. But they shatter our expectations. One in particular, Malu (Luz María), really keeps the storyboard discussion going by clarifying and answering questions while others seemed a bit confused by the connection between comics and videos. We later find out she studied art in college. She would be great at continuing a class like this.

Before we have finished explaining the two examples we have made for them, they are ready to do an example together on the board. Halfway through the example on the board and they are clamoring for pencils and paper to begin drawing and working on a story of their choosing. When the idea of groups is brought up as a possibility, they murmur for awhile and thirty seconds later the room rearranges and we have 4 groups of 2. 14 year old Brahayan and twentysome year old but married with kids Rocio work quietly together on a story of a witch interrupting a dinner in town and being beaten. Alison and Carlos tackle a video of how the park is being used by kids. Yubi and Jimmy decide to storyboard a story they had heard from their interview of a bunch of thieves being buried alive in the hole they had been using to stash local wealth. Malu and Cecilia drew out plans for a family that wants to adopt and ends up mistreating the kid in the end. One might say that Cecilia and Malu win the artistic award, but all the work was outta this world so it wouldn’t make sense from a scale/dial perspective. Actually all the storyboards were amazingly done from an aesthetic perspective. We heard one comment about not being able to draw, but it didn’t show through in the end. Rather, the result was one of colored sketches, ruler straightness, and even a one-point perspective drawing.

Fussing with their sketches, the students requested to stay later, and we ended up finishing 1.5 hours later than the scheduled time simply hanging out as they worked intensely. Impressed, we set the homework bar high and requested they also make another storyboard, this time about a typical day in the life of one of the partners and to also film one of them completely by next class (Thursday). By Saturday, both will be filmed, and this will mark the end of the “get to know your camera and have fun stage of the class.” From there we will test out our NGO evaluation idea, and see if they are into it.

After that we thank the TV and extension cord neighbors for letting us borrow their things and pack up for home. Dinner is waiting – pollo estofado, chicken tomatoey stew with potatotes and peas over rice and lettuce. Soup also with bread and tea to follow.

Tomorrow, Yubi, one of our students is interested in joining us on our morning run. Que chevere says Brooke, since she assumes she will no longer be the slowest in the group. We shall see.

Nunca Falta

2009-08-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

1 August, Saturday

Sometimes in the mornings, I feel as though we might be sloths. By the time we have finally peeled ourselves from the sheets, the potatoes are already being boiled,the quaker is being heated, and our family is almost always wide awake. Except Ariana who usually hides under her covers asleep until later. Around 9am, Edwin arrives at the door from his security administration job. At night, the family eats dinner together with the television murmuring in the corner. Afterwards, Edwin has to leave for work and the family entertains his two year old daughter. When Adam is around, she plays with her fingernails and refuses to look him in the eyes or even talk. Otherwise, she is very vocal. Mostly to whine or tell people to get her things. Edwin is supposed to go to teach Karate at the casita around 9am, and we are supposed to go with him so we can be on our way to being black belts. Better to start now since it takes a minimum off 4.5 years to achieve it.

This morning we tried a drink of ground, toasted corn (maize tostado molido). It is totally delicious so we down about three cups each. Que rico, as our abuelita might say. In addition, we down the avocados from the Velarde astoHuawáu family with some bread. Since we are playing the class mostly by ear, depending on what the kids want to do, we are setting up our worksheets day by day. We have a bare skeleton of what we are going to do with fairly detailed assignments, but for the most part we are trying to play off their interests. So this means a lot of going into town to print and make copies for our class.

We were invited to lunch at the Velarde astoHuawáu at noon, so we rush back from La Tinguiña (largest town nearby complete with Internet Cafes and lots of cars). Lunch talk varies. We go from a miracle working child from the mountains, nearby dormant volcanoes, ancient tunnels that go from here to Pisco, and the typical farm work that goes on here. Apparently there is harvest on Monday and Tuesday (combined work of machine and man, sweeping over the fields to gather up the fruits of many months labor). We may attend depending on our schedule. More than anything, we just want to make sure that we aren't taking work from anyone.

We have to go back to Ica to make a final worksheet, find replacement batteries for our students, and hoard some oranges for back home. Tranquilo. The travel back forth will eventually add up so it might be a good idea to start planning out some worksheets for massive paper-sucking progress.

Thirty minutes before our class, we hustle over to Rocío's house to retrieve the television. There's only one outlet in our meeting place so we have to sacrifice light for being able to preview the videos. We set up some office hours, let the kids know that they can always stop by the house to get replacement batteries or jus talk, and inquire about good dates for the final showing of their final film. Then, the juicy part. We show their clips!! It is a very exciting moment to get to know their different styles. Some of them talked with the camera while others strategically set up to capture their daily transaction to purchase bread. More than anything, we got movies of the animals that they share their lives with. Dogs, chickens, canaries, cats, parrots, stuffed rabbits, and even guinea pigs. Some interesting footage arose from when a girl is inside a fairly nice house, says that now we'll go into the living room, and then opens the door. Her living room is no longer there because it collapsed in the earthquake, but there are still a few old sofas that are turned upside, exposed to the open air above. The videos are promising, but we'll see how they do with something more restrained.

Back at home, we encounter Juan who has just come back from fumigated the fields. Señor Lopez has still not returned from the land in Cañete that their daughter is trying to sell. We heat up some soup, rice, chicken, and fish for dinner and gather around the table to set our teeth in yet some more delicious food.

Tomorrow, we are teaching how to story board. Tonight, we have many things to accomplish before we sleep. In the car on the way back from Ica, we drove around the Viña Tacana. The sun was starting to sink behind the mountains, delineating the part where the sky meets the earth. The light made all the things on the ground, near the tires of our cab, seem sharp. Not close to everything, but definitely parts, of the project were illuminated in this moment. Not legible or tangible things, but a better sense surrounding our final product.

31 July, Friday

This morning was particularly cold, with clouds over the sun and frigid air permeating all cracks in any corner. Last night, we passed out early so our plans for today are to give the finishing touches to our curriculum. Adam helps out with breakfast while Brooke cleans up the room. The house has a main concrete floor that extends from the living room and down the hallways, but each individual room is connected straight to the earth. We tenderly call the hole in our ceiling the skylight. Thankfully, it is covered with plastic so that the morning mist doesn’t blanket us as we sleep. How much closer can you be to the free and open air while still sleeping under hand woven covers encompassed by four adobe walls? Our room is always a shelter from the afternoon heat, where the dirt remains cool on our feet. For this, we are thankful.

Marcela jokes that we should start to call her “abuelita” (little grandma) at breakfast where the garlic, onions, and tomatoes soak through our sandwiches. Quaker tops it all off, and our hands are warmed by our mugs by the time we leave breakfast. Between learning how to prepare papas rellena and preparing for our class at 4pm, we were booked. Papas rellenas are very time consuming because it involves boiling, peeling, mashing, rehashing, and then making little balls of mashed potatoes filled with spicy meat filling. Then the balls get dipped in egg and fried up so that they stick together. Of course, we recorded the entire process so that we could create a short film of our host family cooking. Eggs. Peppers. Potatoes. And at the very end, a shot of the finished meal with some commentary by Miss Brooke. “How delicious!” When we premiered it during class, it elicited many smiles. Ariana’s short appearance with her giggle and huge eyes caused the entire room to fall into a sigh of “que linda.” Glad it was a hit.

We dreamt a syllabus that highlighted objectives of our course, expectations from our students, and our proposed schedule and themes. Meanwhile, Adam blogged what might have been the longest continuous blogging session of our time here. It was well deserved considering the topic was our host family. Then, we ate papas rellenas.

Push. Push. Push. Pumping the bicycle to its every last drop up and over gravel roads and dirt speedbumps. Pirata the dog high tailing close behind, trying to keep up with the steady pace towards the printer in town. Since our rural community isn’t much up on its technology (i.e. internet and copy machines etc), we have to go into La Tinguiña to get our worksheets multiplied. Meanwhile, Brooke tranquilly edits the example video. Testing out different paces and angles. iMovie is painfully slow, but it’s the only things we’ve got.

During class, we have a total of ten people. We happen to also have ten flip cameras. Our age group is everything from 12 to 28, with a mix of 7 girls and 3 boys. The class almost lasts an hour, full of introductions, explanations, and questions. We’ve already distributed the cameras and homework for next time. Surprisingly smooth sailing. It seems like only the weekends will work for this group so we are going to look more into seeing how we can make Santa Rosa work into the equation. Pirata and a niña get dangerously close to our camera that is taping the reunion. Our new tripod is holding up well. In fact, it’s holding up the camera mostly.

Onto more serious things. Volleyball. Like, let’s bet on the game sort of volleyball. Like, let’s play so hard we have to sit out sort of volleyball. So we face-off against one another in what might have been the most intense game of my life. Given, I’ve played volleyball about.. 3 times, but still. When we arrived, Team 1 was up by two games in a 3 out of 5 competition. Brooke joined Team 1 who promptly then lost two games in a row. So we had our tie breaking moment, teeth-gritting, finger-crossing, hair-pulling, edge of your seat game. It ended up being 14-14 (trying to get to fifteen). Just as I thought we had lost, something strange and totally normal in volleyball happened. I wish I knew the rules, but apparently the other team celebrated preemptively. Oh, and then Team 1 won.

So then we wined, dined, and winded down.

30 July, Thursday

At 6am, the landscape is lit and there is Luz. The cold is strong, and she is waiting. We are expecting to go out with her to find the Presidenta of Vaso de Leche (a government subsidized program that aims to give milk to poor families with children). Today's mission: find the youthful. Gloria and Luz promise to lead us around today, instead bumbling around blindly by ourselves. However, we find out that this morning the milk was distributed extra early. Like 4am early. So that option is out; instead, we traipse along the streets with her to post around the three pueblitos. Strategically.

Basically, the rest of the day then consisted of translating curriculum, continuing to pasar la voz, learning how to cook guiso de coliflor, eating, eating, eating, and lunch.

Most important of our day was our late night reunion with Gloria and Luz where we knocked on doors, ceaselessly conversing and persuading young people to come to our info session tomorrow at four.

Now for logistics.

PS. Our new mascot, Pirata (an ironically friendly pit bull bulldog mix) went running with us this morning and accompanied us on all of our visits. Pirate cause he has a patch on his eye. Patch of dark hair, that is. Not a real one. Unfortunately. That'd be cool. Demonstrated here..

Good night.

29 July, Wednesday

Some of us don’t know the details of the early morning sunrise because they stayed in bed. Others of us crouched over a steaming hot, crackling pan of sweet potatoes on a makeshift stove. Both are sweet destinies. It’s a wood powered makeshift stove that our family uses to cook up oversized portions of food. It consists of a couple of bricks with rebar strategically placed atop, where the pots and pans sit. Underneath, the fire is roaring.

9am appointment with the Gloria Alejo-Escobar family to learn how to cook a typical Peruvian lunch time favorite: Tallarin Rojo con Papas a la Huancaina. Basically spaghetti with red sauce, potatoes reclining on some lettuce drizzled with delicious nacho cheese stuff. We arrive a little late because we end up knee-dip in discussion with our host family, but Gloria tells us that we shouldn’t worry since they are just starting to eat breakfast. She says 10 minutes max, so we go walking to pass time. From morning jogs, portions of the town are already well marked on GPS. There’s a large bodega (wine making place) owned by a large company on a large plot of land near by that seems interesting. To get there, all you need to do is follow the large adobe circumference of a wall. The towering wall has fallen in some areas, but many parts of it are topped off with bits and pieces of broken glass bottles to deter intruders. Where there are piles of adobe instead of wall, the holes have been covered up with barbed wire. In addition to that, there are towers filled with slow moving security guards, situated on the outskirts of the sprawling grape kingdom.

Why such tight barriers? The grape fields were bought from local farmers by a large company who then consolidated all the land for big business. Now the farmers who used to own the land toil as hired-hands. There’s a lot to be said on this topic. Poor farmers? Big bad business? Progress? More efficiency?

So, on an economic level this sort of looks like agricultural industrialization straight out an international development text book. Insert technology or big business, form two sectors. Now there’s a sustenance sector and there’s the capital sector. What used to be individuals on farms turns into a more efficient machine so that all the surplus labor gets sent to the cities. This much is typical. On a more microscopic level, you start to consider the human rights aspect of the wage. The wages are not as high as they could be compared to the wages of the head boss. Can they be making more money in a city? And if they can, why don’t they move there? Maybe it’s the comfort of the countryside, the inertia needed to get away, or something more ingrained… Then you start to think about progress, efficiency, and creative destruction. Is this change better for a larger group of people than just the farmers? Would these questions make more sense of the crop was for food and not for making wines? Finally, if efficiency is at stake, then there are sure to be fertilizers and irrigation involved which makes you sort of think about the environmental impact of homogenized crops. Capitalist take over? The ruin of a small, rural area? These are all surface thoughts though, and we’ve yet to really think the moral implications through.

Needless to say, we returned quite late to Gloria’s house. Brooke got to learn how to cook, scuttling about while trying to discern orders being joyfully shouted in Spanish. “Pelar! Pelar!” Uhhhh. Peel this potato? ¡Sí sí! Ingredients galore while Alex and Adam chatted away with some quality family who was visiting from Lima. The music blasted through the house, wafting along with the smells from stove tops. The ladies joked about how they wanted to have tall, blonde sons like them American boys. It was quite useful to have six-foot-flat Adam for setting up shade shelters to eat underneath. Otherwise, it would just be grandma with a large stick trying to reach up into the rafters to balance the shade. Alex looks overwhelmed by his mountain-sized plate. Before heading out to Lima later today, he’s gotta get his fair fill of home-made Peruvian cooking. And we chat and chat and chat. Even in gossip, we hardly ever heard an ill-word on any one in the neighborhood. The optimism and resilience of the community here is almost tangible.

Afterwards, we say good bye to Alex who is heading North for the waves to take him away. I wish that we could all be California giiiiirls, a la Beach Boys style. Gracías por todo, Alejandro y Lindsay! Oh yeah, before leaving, Alex plays with the guinea pigs. They’re not quite big enough to be eaten yet, but we’re promised Sunday cuy. Woah.

We have a short meeting with the community to do some final fact-checking. What age group is going to be best? What time will our introduction meeting be? Gloria, Luz, Alison, and Pamela all give us a consultation in their area of expertise: the pueblito. Immediately after, we have to run off to dinner which our host mom made for us: beans, rice, and chicken. It is exceptionally delicious, and we are jealous of Edwin and Jose for getting to eat like this everyday. So we tell them how lucky they are, but instead of saying “oh yes, we know,” they just giggle as men oftentimes giggle. This is how we discovered that Edwin had actually made dinner tonight. In fact, everyone in the family cooks. Apparently, most Peruvians start to hang on their mother’s skirts in the kitchen by age 12. From there, they learn all the invaluable secrets of cooking trade that makes us grovel and salivate.

After a few jokes and trying to soften up Adriana (age 2), we retire to the cave to complete our daily tasks. Which, pleasantly includes drawing posters to post around the community. Our resident artist does that, of course. And he’s darn good at it.

28 July, Tuesday

After drawing some church exteriors in Ica, whilst waiting for Alex R. to arrive on the scene, we return to our new humble abode by bike. We get comfortable, chat with the family (which seems to grow larger every time we turn around. There are daughters from Lima, visitors, etc), and then do the momentous task of LAUNDRY.

More food. More chatting with families, but this time next door. And all topped off by walking around to know the place. The end.

27 July, Monday

We were adopted today. Official integrantes of the familia Lopez.

But that was later in the day.

This morning we had arranged to come over in the afternoon. Till then we tried our best to make good use of our time in San Clemente. Sara is/was/will forever be precisely that. She is the presidenta of the Cruz Roja/Arquitectos de la Emergencia Vivienda construction project in Santa Rosa.

She is very sad that we have decided to use Nueva Esperanza as our main site for work, and we discuss the possibilities of doing work in both towns. We make it clear that the only way this could have a chance of working is if there exist at least a couple very ambitious and responsible people within the community who have the time to basically run the class in Santa Rosa and would actually be coming to see our first couple classes in Nueva Esperanza to see how they might start something in Santa Rosa, and we would come by when we could to help out with the class.

Though this idea seems interesting to us off the bat, it intuitively seems to be very difficult simply because of real life. It would be interesting to have people from multiple communities working together on the project together and having the classes taught as much as possible by locals, but the whole transport thing back and forth and lack of direct accountability established if we were to leave cameras behind in both places, etc seems a bit overwhelming. Not to mention, we hope to spend some time getting to know the community we are staying in and that is much more difficult to do if you are bouncing back and forth with a 1.5 hour commute one way.

But its possible, and two 20 year old girls show us around a bit. They claim to be very willing to make the project work and be those interested teachers. That makes solid ruling-out of the two community option for the time being so we agree to play it by ear a little bit.

Sara seems to be happier – I hope we are not giving them false hopes because we would really prefer to not leave enemies behind even if it is due to such a small miscommunication.

After this we packed all our stuff up and headed for the bus pick-up spot. Time to meet our family in Manco Cápac, a caserío of La Tinguiña, a suburb of Ica. Manco Cápac is one of three caseríos in which we will be working. Three clusters of homes very close to each other that they are seeminlgy the same pueblo. Kinda intriguing how that separation has developed rather than a single community, maybe we can learn more about that over the span of the next month.

Our new place is approximately 30 mins by car outside of Ica. We veer off the paved road to follow some dirt paths through vast farmlands full of at least corn, grapes, potatoes, and sweet yams. Gloria, a serious leader from the same caserío escorts us to our new home that is placed conveiently near where we will be holding our classes – La Casa de Las Sonrisas, “the house of smiles” which is a multipurpose community gathering center.

Outside of our new house we find Juan. He is feeding the dogs with what looks like the scraps from lunch preparation. He is also tossing out the dishwater into the dry channel outside their front door. This channel is a man-reinforced, dry riverbed called la Achirana. Juan greets us warmly. “Mamá, ven! Ya vinieron los nuevos integrantes de la familia!” (Mama, come! The new family members are here!)

Mama is named Marcela and she came from the sierra highlands of Huancavélica. They have lived in their current location for around 50 years. Juan is 39. Marcela speaks spanish with a cadence of a native Quechua speaker – a native tongue.

They immediately shoo us iinto the house and drop everything to help us get our stuff into the nice room they have set up for us. The room has a dirt floor and adobe walls painted white. Two large beds are nicely made up, and even yet the room has space for a small desk, two chairs, and room to set our things down.

The walls are covered in homemade art – a classic pencil sketch of fruit and pot, a roaring robot lion with an oversized 4-pack, a landscape painted scene with really nice evergreen trees, a butcher advertisement, a ad for a workshop on the Applied Sciences of Sport, an ad for a workshop on Metaphysical Philosophy, Two 8.5 x 11 sheets with hand copied bible verses, a calendar from the Alps, a yellow plastic clock that is either 1 hour fast or 23 hours slow, a hand-drawn DragonBall Z character with bright yellow hair and tattoos, and a Good Year 2000 calendar rocking a blue Lamborghini. Someone´s an artist around here.

After getting settled in they bring out a bowl of dried plums. Thirty minutes later into the converstation and a son-in-law arrives with a hat, glasses, little girl, and pecans. Edwin se llama. His daughter of 2 years is named Ariana. She is very shy and serious around strangers. Maricela took the bag of pecans into the kitchen. 30 seconds later a bowl of pecans was in front of us. Along with bananas.

The rest of the day is going to be a matter of us simply being around to get to know our new family. Hang out with them. Chill. Help out wherever we can. Play with the kids. (1 of Juan´s 8 siblings lives nearby and showed up with his wife and two boys: Osmar (4) and Jairen (2)). Adam pulls out a notebook to attempt a sketch of a particularly cracked portion of the adobe walls, and the kids are fascinated. Getting the hint, we pull out some pens, some markers and some sketch notebooks and hand them to the kids. Jairen prefers to eat and run around – preferring to explore his own world. Osmar and Ariana on the other hand immediately begin to cover the pages with pictures. Osmar draws a niña and colors her purple. Next he tries his hand at drawing a page full of different animals. Then he tries to copy the character on the cover of a book sitting on the table. He really likes to draw heads and torsos with legs originating from awkward places. On each page he signs his name in large cursive letters. Ariana prefers the scribble-on-each-page-for-as-many-pages-as-possible technique.

Their house is one of the very few homes made of adobe that stayed in tact through the earthquake. Without prompting on our part, they began to describe their experience with the earthquake and how each of them had reacted. Through the collaborative recounting of the event we received a very good idea for the different personalities in the family. Juan is a very religious evangelical as of 7 years ago after a radical conversion. Juan believes God miraculously saved the house from falling onto his family who was inside a the time. The rest of the family is Catholic. The father did very well for the family for sometime working on their farm. Then the big businesses created a market for agriculture that smaller farmers could no longer compete with. The farm was sold, and he slowly wasted the money trying to find something to soothe his loss of profession. He would come home drunk and beat Marcela while she was pregnant.

After years of this, the older siblings decided Marcela should separate from him. Señor Lopez as the family calls him still has a bed and a small room in the back where he sleeps. In fact, he walks in later that night. He has white hair, one droopy eye, two droopy shoulders and a loud voice. He also welcomes us very warmly to his home, the home he designed. He believes the home lasted the earthquake because he watched the construction workers carefully to ensure that the job was well done. He also thinks God kept the house in tact so that he could receive us as visitors in his home.

What a great family. After helping clean up after a dinner of small brown beans, rice and fried fish we head off to bed with our heads spinning; intoxicated with warm conversation, children sounds, and homecooked food. We offer to help with breakfast prep the next morning and they seem to be more than pleased to open us up to their daily activities. 6 am they start the fire and quaker for breakfast and by 6:30 they will start frying the sweet yams. We are very glad that our family cooks on an open fire (they also have a gas stove they use) and makes quaker in the mornings. And they raise cuyes (guinea pigs), and ducks, for themselves and to sell. Before the large dairy farmers moved in they had 8 cows, 48 goats, and a few pigs. They now use that pen space for a home garden with vegetables and the cuy-fattening alfalfa. Below is a picture of our soon to be DINNER!!

The community we chose

2009-07-26T14:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Break it up

2009-07-26T10:38:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, July 22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, July 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, July 20

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

“Expletive, where is the still camera?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kid next to me says, vamos a matarles!

2009-07-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

19 July, Sunday Feliz día!

Wish Brooke a happy birthday when you see her next.
It’s an early start cause we’ve got a mountain of work in front of us. But FIRST, a tamale. Hooray for all night cooking, black waters, and delicious interiors. We were told to meet at the Soyuz bus no later than 6:15. People start trickling in at 6:25ish. We don’t leave until 6:40.

Peruvians, I hear, have an issue with punctuality.

Once we’re in Chincha, we have the most delicious breakfast of mystery meat sandwiches and strawberry milk honey shakes. Then we taxi over to Pueblo Nuevo. Pueblo Nuevo is at the very top of the Chincha region nearby Chincha Alta and Grocio Prado. The area has a beautiful center square complete with a highway lined with palm trees. Apparently, the plaza was fine after the earthquake, but many of the buildings around it have broken windows and cracks down their sides that reach towards the roof.

There are volunteers here from the municipality too. One for each of us. Hugo and Brooke. Raúl and Adam. And after a lengthy diatribe sobre the encuestas, we have to head out to begin, an hour and a half late. We plan on returning back at 1pm for a quick lunch at a polleria. And after we see Javier, our leader, do a practice run, set off by ourselves.

We average about 10 surveys an hour at first. The houses are divided in manzanas (yes, that’s an apple). Imagine a big grid where the lines are streets and the squares are lined with homes with free space in the middle for back yards. That square is a manzana. So if you have to do houses 1 to 15 on manzana A, and then 3-8 on mnzana B, you end up on the other side near manzana C and then have to back track.

Everyone we talk to was eligible for bonuses or BanMat cards (materials bank). No one received money or supplies. Many people are only able to reconstruct with their own money or through a Techo Proprio program. With the recent changes they’ve made to their business, many people are unable to pay the monthly bill. We try hard to finish off just one last manzana before going back for lunch. CARAPULCRA! So good. Heavenly, I’d say.

After lunch it was already around 2:30pm. Javier, the NGO rep in charge, decided we would stop all encuestas at 4pm to ensure that we were all back in well before dark set in. Unfortunately our local municipal guides, who know the places like the backs of their hands and even have little hand-made maps of the layout, have to leave for a 3pm meeting. We reorganize and decide we cannot finish today and will have to leave some sectors for next weekend.

Since Brooke and I were given the shortest list of encuestas, we both finished ours by 4pm. Out of 7 surveys, 3 were finished and the others had around a total of 100 encuestas left for next weekend. At 4:30pm we were all accounted for, reimbursed for travel expenses, and invited to stick around to join the beer circle. We do for awhile. They say its birthday beer.

Since we are in the area we decide to spend the rest of our time hanging out with Choche and his family. As expected they treat us to much food and drink. Choche says its birthday wine. Then we fall asleep, psyched for waking up early.

18 July, Saturday WORK IT
“Yo puedo cocinar huevos.”

In the mornings, as the sun starts to rise in Peru, robots flood the streets. They equip themselves with megaphones and drone their messages to wake up the unsuspecting. “Breeeeead! French breeeead!” “Apples, oranges, oh so sweet!” ...Not really, but most mornings sound like a robot battle in the streets. Street vendors ride around on bicycles with a load of fruit in a front trailer. But the doppler effect and the distortion of the megaphone combined with the monotony of hearing about pan or frutas over and over again makes it seem like electronic war could be being raged outside our windows. It's a strangely pleasant feeling.

Today we took a leisurely breakfast in the market at the normal quaker lady with a new twist. We brought our own homemade bowls (the bottom of 2.5 liter water bottles), plastic spoons we've been saving through all our meals, and a bottle of soy yogurt. Our plastic spoons have managed to survive at least a month now because we take care of them each and every time we're done eating by licking every bit of food off. It grosses Lauren out. Heh. On a side note, soy products cost significantly less in Peru since being a hippie, vegan, save-the-planet freak isn't popular and ergo a non-profitable business.

Our recently set routine is 3 soles of surprises, 2 soles of bread, and 2.10 soles on quaker. Each day we venture further into the depths of the market in search of surprises, and now we know (very well) the sleeping beast within. Our surprises range from peanuts to apples, oranges, bananas, peaches, and plums. So we shake up a fruit parfait and chug quaker. Maybe it's because it's a Saturday, but all the vendors were lazy today. Usually we ask for 1 sole of apples and they fill up a bag, weigh it, and tie a cute little knot for us. Today, sin embargo, they just hand us bags and tell us to do it ourselves. A day of rest? Who knows.

Since we have 2 conflicting appointments again, we plan on splitting up. There is a Cáritas Fair in San Juan Bautista and an architecture/urban planning class with UNICA. We all ride to the Cáritas office and split up from there. Adam hops in a cab with a Cáritas chica, and the girls set off to find class.

The first UNICA we stop at isn't the UNICA we're looking for. It's just one branch of many. There is, in fact, a Pisco UNICA and a city of ICA UNICA, and a Pan-American UNICA. I suspect there are more, but the one we are looking for is a good 3 kilometers outside the city. I thought it was going to be a day of rest. When we arrive, we come encounter a 50 student classroom of fourth years who are studying a variety of topics (architecture, urban planning, civil engineering). Only 5 or 6 are female. Everyone explains that most girls at UNICA are more interested in Human Rights or Communication. Everyone wants to know what it's like to take courses in the United States. Curious is a nice word for - acting like high school monkeys who know how to make paper airplanes and are are happily swinging about in the jungle.

Profesora Rosario is thirty minutes late for her class. When she enters, everyone settles down but the rowdiness is bubbling right underneath the surface. She discusses how a city is like a living organism, what proportions of what kinds of buildings make up urban centers, and the upcoming project. Today we are going to visit La Tierra Prometida to do encuestas and to see for ourselves what kind of conditions the people are living in. What does the air feel like there? How do the people live? What kind of soil? Before this, she asks Lauren to stand in front of the class to introduce herself. Afterwards, she asks three volunteers to tell us about Ica and how the city relates to their studies. Her sole goal is to embarrass as many people as possible in front of a large group. One says that engineering work is important since they are located on a fault line near a beach where the soil is not very anti-seismic. Check. Or at least that's as much as I understood. Another talks about how there is a lack of soil studies done before constructing which then leads to unsuccessful buildings. Check.

Then we head out. We watch the students do encuestas under a scorching sun from the shade.

Upon our return to Ica proper, Lorena chows down on two ice creams. Then we share a soup. Then a rice dish with chicken adobo. More water. Oh so much water.
Back home, we all do laundry together. In the same bathroom. One at the sink, one in the shower, one hovering over the shower. All squished into a bathroom (so tiny!) laundry doing party. The floor was wetter than our clothes, and I'm not entirely sure how clean everything can really be, but it's better than it was before. We think. Except the shirt that fell in the toilet. Oops.

Tonight's din din is on Proética since we are going to be waking up at the crack of dawn for them tomorrow morning. In addition, we are attending an orientation meeting at 8:00 to learn the survey before we enseñar our mirror group mañana in Pueblo Nuevo. Proética is a pro-transparency NGO. Our branch focuses on government corruption. Our surveys ask how many are in the family, how bad the destruction was after the earthquake, whether the house has a “certificado damnificado;” and which reconstruction program (6.000 soles or mivivienda) they were eligible for. The kicker is that almost al the homes in my sample were deemed eligible but have yet to receive their bonuses. Lauren walks in an hour late to the meeting, elbow deep in a bag of 5 soles worth of animal crackers. That translates to something around a kilo’s worth. Ai mamí!

The volunteers hail from UNICA and study civil engineering, communications, or law. In order to collect them up, Leonardo had to go to several universities to give a short talk about his work and ask in person for volunteers. What we see today is only half of those that agreed to help. Apparently participation is a tough deal in Perú. All the NGOs we’ve worked with have had issues with attendance so it’s no surprise. After many clarifications, we all leave the meeting to hang out and eat pizza in the plaza. And guess what?? The pizza’s from Lindsey’s favorite ice cream place! So she has two cones-worth. She might have had three if it weren’t for other limiting factors. Her dessert stomach is NOT a limiting factor (as she explains, there are two stomachs. One for food. One for sweets. Guess which one is never full?).

Oh yeah, like always, we sleep at the end of the night.

Wouldn´t it be great if we were older

2009-07-18T13:51:00.000-07:00

Friday, 17 July
“And I totally am in love with Henry. And our chicken lady-lover pair was there, but not our tea lady nor our smoothie lady, oh but our ice cream man was.”

When some people get older they become more humble, even though they have only gotten wiser. Type 1. Others listen less, and talk more. Type 2. What does that to them?

Henry is type 1. To the 100th power. Too many old ones are type 2 – but they´re friendly and harmless so we advocate keeping them around despite their twosomeness.

Breakfast was fruits and pan and quaker at our new breakfast spot in the market. We like the whole table to put fruits and bread on thing. They had milk and manzana quaker this morning. ¿Cómo se escribe ´delicious´ en francés?

9am radio show with CODEHICA. Weekly, one-hour long, and titled ´Voces por La Reconstrucción´. Sounds up our alley so we´ve been excited all week to hit this bad boy up. We film them interviewing a couple journalists from the ´Periodistas por La Reconstrucción´ group and hear some community feedback on the ground from Sunampe and Pisco on what they think of the reconstruction so far. Their responses are very familiar, as we´ve heard the same things many times via our community surveys.

10am interview with Ingrid, an NGO worker at APORTES. We arrive a bit late and it seems she is taking time out of free time this Friday to hook us up with her words of wisdom. And suddenly Brooke had done her first complete on-her-own real-life larger-than-life totally-in-spanish interview. It may have taken 3 hours and felt somewhat like being murdered with a corn cob, but it happened. And when the husks were swept away, months of ceaseless Spanish-intake efforts and Ingrid´s unique perspective were smelted together to glitter like a golden success nugget.

After this interview we had a brief breath of fresh air – and by fresh air I mean leftover fruits, bread and a angel-fruit cake like pastry. We confirm our interview at 2pm and also confirm our meeting in Pisco with Henry Flores. During the radio show we had heard about a 5pm march in Pisco in protest of the lack of reconstruction on the part of the government. Interesante. Of course, we still had to remember the CODEHICA workshop with journalists and students later on tonight. So we decided to do it all. And then, we did.

But first we interrupt your normal blogging program with a miner strike. No, not a minor strike. A strike about the current income rates for iron miners in Peru. Their flyers are labeled “Unidad Sindical” and tell “las autoridades de trabajo: respeto al derecho de huelga y a la libertad sindical!” They’ve been on indefinite strike as of the 13th of July until their demands for .70 centimos raises have been met. “El gobierno no debe proteger a empresa que no respeta los derechos laborales (The government should not protect a business which does not respect labor rights).” They are fighting for a raise of 23 American cents.

From here, we split up. The interview at 2pm was at Guadalupe, a town outside Ica, and with Casas de la Salud rep Percy Gutierrez. Brooke now has two feathers in her cap and gets the sweet reward of seeing our favorite community member: Janet. And don’t forget her 5 beautiful children. I encounter Lucera chewing on a sugar cane outside on a dirt mound, intently supervising a work site. A cement mixer is roaring in the background and wheelbarrows are flying between it and the foundation’s trenches. She runs up for hugs and kisses, and then we go into her house where Janet is breastfeeding the newest addition to the family. I also say hi to Percy, and we ask Janet to conduct the interview in her house. She dodges to the left, she barrel rolls past the right, and GOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL! I conduct my next full-on in-Spanish interview.

In one of our more recent brainstorming sessions, we brilliantly formulated a worksheet with questions specifically dedicated to workers in the field. We infused this sheet with some of the burning questions that have lain dormant in our bosoms. Then there was an eruption of courage and determination within our hearts to include said questions in our typical q+a sessions. Thus became the “Ficha del Campo.” Which was so deftly utilized by our budding journalist hero. Casas de la Salud plan on constructing at a rate of 5 homes per month. Four months of work to finish houses for 20 families. In addition to homes, they will be planting trees and hosting community-building talleres. Despite the lack of attendance at last Saturday’s meeting, he says that the people of Guadalupe are much more likely to participate and come to meetings than many of the other communities they’ve worked with. It’s all due to the intense initiative of the informal leaders of the town. One thing that I find interesting about their work is that they divide the work into smaller projects so that the housing construction is staggered. After the first trial run, the architect conducts interviews with the people to decide on how to make the homes more suitable for the needs of the people in that specific region. Then they move onto the second group and so on.

In Pisco, we’re hitting up the PNUD office to talk to handy dandy Henry Flores. He suggests two groups: “Espacio y Espresión” who wants to do work with kids to discern new uses for public spaces or maybe with a group of urban planners/architects instead of the kids. He also mentions working with his friend Jorge who is in charge of stirring up democracy in the minds of ambitious youth. Maybe we can draw from this pool of know-who. We bring up our idea for troubleshooting a larger scale project about evaluation that we’ve had in mind. Are there other organizations already providing public information about the failures and successes of these privately funded, civil service organizations? On the topic of APCI, he refers us to the website but advises us that their work is mostly regulatory. Like an FDA stamp for organizations. As an alternative, he suggests CIES which apparently has at least produced some evaluation report. It´s location is known only by his secretary. Finding any more info looks like a job for the… Internet! We will spend a whole lot of time researching the responsibildades de estas organizaciones. In the future. When we get some free time.

While Brooke colectivos, taxis, walks, and bikes from Guadalupe to the CODEHICA office, Adam and Lorena leisurely enjoy the stomping and shouting of a peaceful protest march at the central square. “¡¿Alcalde rata, donde está la plata?!” “Rat of a Mayor, where’s the money?!” They reminisce in the good ol’ days of Pisco while visiting the normal ice cream man and chicken sandwich couple. If some people get more humble or more talkative as they get older, there is a third category of people who just get more bad ass and greasy. And we love them for their threesomeness.

Adam and Lorena try to hop on the bus back to Pisco but it only has space for 1 person. Anti-splitting up as we are, we choose to hang back. Turns out, a truck driver nearby saw it all, and offered us a ride and a lollipop. So we said cool. He said, ´my place afterwards´? And we said cool. But really, we caught a ride back in a 32 ton tanker transporting hydrochloric acid to Arequipa. Fun and exciting, just ask Lindsey, who fell asleep 10 mins in due to the fast and furiousness of living in 3rd gear.

At CODEHICA, there is a meeting at 4:30 with students. Except there isn’t. But she still waits around for them until 5:00 since everyone is normally 30 minutes late. After asking again about the meeting, the security guard changes his mind and says that maybe it’s actually at 5:30. Unfortunately, they people hosting the meeting are all in another kind of meeting and can’t answer the questions about meetings until they’re done meeting in their meeting. Meeting meeting meeting meeting. So again, there is some waiting around. At 5:30, there is frustration and a decision to go out and ask the hosts of the meeting what’s up. There never was a 4:30 meeting. In fact, the next meeting we have scheduled at 7pm is actually at 6:30. Or is it?

Anyways, the meeting for Periodistas Unidas Por La Reconstrución (scheduled for 6:30) doesn’t begin until 7:15. Más que nada it is an organizing rendez-vous to decide who is going to which community, who is calling which mayor, and what their organization’s name and emblem is going to be. Afterwards, we pick out people who write about private institutions as they relate to reconstruction. That’ll be useful in the future.

So then we are all like, let’s meet back at headquarters. And we do. And we debrief each other. And celebrate Pisco by eating hot hot chicken sandwiches and sweet bread. And we upload. And we sleep, oh don’t we sleep.

Thursday, 16 July
“I bought 48 cookies today. I only planned on eating one package of 6, but then they looked so good, I had to eat another one. On my third, I decided that eating a fourth would gross me out enough to prevent a fifth.”

Our rent is due. Our landlord is pounding on the door. I thought it might have been room service.

No breakfast in bed this morning. Instead, we all go to the market to eat diner-style. We split up into the fruit group and the bread group. The fruit group’s mission is to obtain 2 soles worth of fruit. The bread team will return with 2 soles of bread. The normal bread ladies are missing in action, so we find a joven at the entrance.

Bread man: “How much do you want?”
Adam: “One Sole, please.”
Bread man: “How much?”
Adam: “One Sole.”
Bread man: “But how many pieces of bread?”
This should have been our first indicator that this bread boy was no pillsbury push over. He played dirty and didn’t bat an eyelash when he handed us 14 pannes not 16. When we noted this to him, he reluctantly gave up the last two and 17 soles change for 20. Leaving us one sole short. Eventually we grew frustrated and proceeded to take the boy by his legs, turn him upside down, and shake him down for the rest of our change. Blame Lindsey’s pent up rage.

We sat and drank quaker de manzana. A heftily jolly woman selling corn con queso jaunted over to our table from the middle of the street and asked where we were from. When she found out we were foreigners (not very hard to do since we are gringos) and that Lindsey didn´t know the Spanish word for an ear of corn, she proceeded to pull one out and hand it over. Try this! It´s good for your cholesterol if you have it for breakfast. And so we did. We each got an ear of corn and a little bit of what was quite possibly the best tasting queso of this trip. After talking a while and learning that on other days she sold some sort of yucca treat, she set off and promised to look for us in the market in the future so we could try her other food.

From here we have to run a few errends. We head to GTZ to gather more information on the trip we had returned from, the connection between GTZ and Pachamama, collect a DVD copy of a video shown to the people, and set up a guided site visit on Wednesday with Pachamama´s headquarters in Cusco. Then, we head over to the internet café to print off financial aid documents that cry “we need non-digital signatures”. The scanner is a little harder to come by, not to mention the corresponding jump in price (14.01 in action).

After this we ran over to the plaza de armas to brainstorm for a couple hours and make a couple key calls. We discussed where we would like to return to and what project we would implement. The project is to be designed based on what we feel is lacking in the community-NGO communication aspect of post-disaster reconstruction. The location is a function of the project we choose, but will likely be around Pisco since this seems to be the location of the most sustained NGO intervention at this stage. We conclude that whatever project we do must be very specific or be very preliminary. We discuss many permutations of these two routes, and come up with a couple ideas. We agree that the next stage is to invest time into planning right away, specifically meeting with the right people to find out what they think can be done and their thoughts on the evaluation stage of NGO projects by third-party observers. Luckily we will be interviewing PNUD in Ica later tonight so we can ask them. We also call Henry Flores from PNUD Pisco to set up a meeting with him tomorrow on the same topic. We figure these people have much more knowledge on these topics than we do. It is our priority to find out if we are missing any institutions that do this same kind of work in this region.

Its sunny. Conveniently there is a 1 sol ice cream cone place on the block. We head over there because we suspect Lindsey will be there. She is. Fancy us being right. We treat ourselves to an ice cream each. Tasty balls of lime, cocunut, lúcuma, pecan, and chocolate chip dissolve on twitching, muscular tongues.

Lindsey heads to lunch, and Adam and Brooke decide to try and see Mesa de Concertactón Contra la Pobreza (MCLCP), who apparently has many contacts of local leaders everywhere. Turns out they have a 4 hour lunch break. Literally. So we are forced to go eat lunch with Lindsey. Of course, she is eating the last meal available at a lunch-only restaurant since its 3pm, so we can´t sit together.

Lunch done, and we head over to our PNUD interview. We had set it up with Julio Rojas the Coordinator of the office, but two others (Hernán and Rosario) from the office are kind enough to sit down with us and join as well. The interview goes well. They remind us that PNUD workers cannot be interviewed and can definitely not be filmed – but since we asked nicely and wrote a nice email and have two girls with shy smiles then they´ll let it slide just this once. We like PNUD.

We finish just in time to run over to our 7pm commitment with CODEHICA´s television crew. They are interviewing the Director of the College of Lawyers and someone else for a show that is televised on Saturday nights. It is quite irrelevant to post-disaster, but it gives us a chance to gather footage on the video equipment used by CODEHICA, an NGO involved in the reconstruction as part of its program of general development. Besides, the camera crew is very nice and let us film in the room live, and take many pictures of ourselves pretending to be interviewing each other – i´m pretty sure they saved some footage of us making professional fools of ourselves, but they are chill. One of them had a ACDC shirt on.

Home time. Then dinner time. We savor some pineapple chicken with rice and potatoes and some duck. Chicken soup, and then scalding herbal tea. We had all of this at the new place we found on the West side of the Panamericana highway. The atmosphere is chill and it lends itself to being a hang-out spot for many of the mototaxi drivers.

Wednesday, 15 July
¨I bet your mom´s water broke and she was like, Oh, it´s a Brooke!"

Alarm´s set for 4:02am. Second alarm set for 4:45am. We roll out of bed at 5:25am. Last time that Lindsey is left responsible for making sure we wake up.

Under harsh verbal orders from Brooke, we wake up, pack quickly, and stash our breakfast of yogurt and breads in our packs. We arrive at the German aid institution GTZ at 6:01. We are greeted by a security guard and a cleaning crew, who are friendly, but no Ing. Armando Moyonero. Bad news, is that in our rush we managed to forget our camera battery charger. We anticipate two days with multiple meetings and rural community footage, and are worried we won´t be able to last. So, Brooke, again snaps her fingers to get Adam´s attention, points, and grunts ¨Fetch.¨ And so he does. Good boy, goooood boooooy. Yeh, who´s a goooodddd dogggyy? You´re a goooddd dooooggy!

6:20am and everyone is on site and ready to head out in the van. We get to ride with Armando from GTZ, David the driver, and Renán - Mayor of San Isidro which is the district of the first meeting later today. Renán becomes our new favorite mayor by inviting us all to breakfast. A hearty chicken noodle and egg soup with hot coffee/quaker.

Then we pick up a projector in a box with a projector graphically illustrated on all four sides.

Then David pulled out his sunglasses. Armando zipped up his flaming jacket. Renán squished in the backseat with us three. Asphalt to concrete, concrete to rougher concrete, rougher concrete to dirt. Dust billows behind us in un-Matlable fashion. Thankfully, no one is in sight ahead of us so we aren´t riding into the wind – just dirty.

Dirt to bumpy road and we have to slow down. It looks like its in the middle of a road paving project but why would we know? MIT doesnt teach Civil/Env. Engineers these things. Neither did life apparently. Two of us hold our breath in anticipation of the Sierra landscape – dry gradual mountains that slowly turn more green, more rocky, and higher as one travels further into the departamento de Huancavélica. The other one tries to sleep, cuz she can ´sleep through anything´.

The landscape doesnt disappoint and soon we are happily filming and shooting pics from the inside of the fully caged full cab 4x4 Hilux. Our first stop is Córdova which is about 3 hours from Ica. We stop here to greet the Córdova mayor and set up lodging for the night, since this is the only place in the region with a hotel/hostel. Turns out this town is in the midst of its annual 15 day festival. That would be quince. Brooke and Adam have seen this before elsewhere, and here is the blunt and excusably ignorant foreigners version of what the festival is. It is religious (largely syncretic) and centered around church services, fireworks, dancing, local alcoholic drinks, beer, and folk music. By day 3 expect every single person in town to be drunk.

We end up staying here quite some time to watch fireworks and be invited to drinks from town members dancing behind a train of what looks like a school band. After prying ourselves away and picking up two workers (Walter and Grimaldo) from a partnering NGO Pachamama Raymi, we head up towards San Isidro.

We finally enter San Isidro, which is a spread out district with many farmers. At the first group of 8 roofs we come across, we stop to greet a local resident. 30 mins later we are exiting the cluster, after snacking on beans and potato soup with boiled potato and goat cheese. Rico.

In the end, we do actually reach our final destination, and are greeted by a rather new 3 story municipal building and spacious plaza de armas. Both are rather empty. We are already hours late for the meeting that was scheduled by us, but no one seems to be complaining. The mayor proceeds to announce the beginning of the meeting over a loudspeaker on the outside of the municipal building. It takes awhile for everyone to get settled in and its not until 3pm that the meeting gets going. Rumor has it that the meeting was scheduled to start at 10am. We were too scared to confirm this minor detail, afraid of the answer.

The meeting is only about an hour long and consists of an introduction of the development project set up by GTZ and operated on the ground largely by Pachamama Raymi, which has had a significant record of success working in areas of extreme poverty in Quechua regions of South America and apparently Guatemala. This NGO utilizes a strategy of gradual change realized by setting up a competition among all families of a community to see who can best utilize 2 to 3 years of basic life-improvement training. They help with improved stoves, adobe latrines, vegetable gardens, small animal pens and fish farms – all of which are designed to help the people become self-sustaining and healthy. The next step takes another few years and consists of raising the crop production to goods that can be sold at markets as cash crops. Then comes encouraging vegetation tourism.

Another part of this NGOs strategy is to choose the top performers from the advanced communities to work for them and replicate the same projects in other regions. This is where Walter and Grimaldo come from and they are set on their assigned task of working in San Isidro. They introduce their project to the community members listening and Armando puts a couple videos on the projector as examples of success in other similar rural Andean communities.

After this meeting we are again invited by the mayor to a dinner at his place. It is getting late however, so we decide to go back to Córdova where our lodging is staying. It is now cold, and we choose to sit in the back of the pick-up. It is very cold. Colder than Cusco says Grimaldo. On the way we pick up at least 5 different locals walking from one area to another. They are all very grateful for the ride, and we wonder how often trucks with free space come by. By the way, we met the President of the Farmers Committee and he said transportation costs are killing this region, and says it must be fixed before everyone in the town is forced to leave for elsewhere.

Turns out the hostel we thought we had booked was full. Surprise! Not worried, Armando hunts down the mayor to see if he can find us a place to crash for the night. Everyone in town is partying – only dancing harder than before to shake off the cold. We wait an hour and still cannot find the mayor, and finally decide that it is best to simply return to Ica tonight. The meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning will be cancelled because of the party anyways (everyone will be drunk says Armando, telling us what we could´ve told him.)

Before leaving, however, we sit down to a delicious dinner of rice, ram meat in a delicious sauce, and potatoes with tea to top it off. As expected, everything is more expensive here than Ica (if you eat as cheap as possible) since the food must be imported from town at a cost.

Arrival back at Ica is 11:30pm. We pick up our bikes and follow the short and well-lit road home through the center of town. Yogurt dies. We upload and blog and fall asleep.

14 July, Tuesday
“Hola, it´s Lindsey. I don´t know a whole lot about what Brooke and Adam did today because I stayed home in the morning and watched Wanted. I didn´t like it the first time I saw it and after a second chance today, I still wasn´t impressed. But it was decent I guess. Anyway, almost right after that ended, Brooke and Adam returned home and I was hungry for food, and they were hungry for internet and entrevistas, so we headed out in the direction of sandwiches in hopes of finding internet also. However, Adam quickly broke off from the group and soon after I heard Brooke say something about looking for something but I didn´t understand, so I decided to go my own way and look for some tasties. This took me to the Super de Ica, aka the land of the KEKE, but after eating like 20 keke´s over the last few days, I decided to swear them off. Instead, I got some vanilla yogurt and a ¨Dalmatian¨ treat: gooey chocolate at the center, with chocolate cake outside that, covered in white chocolate with chocolate chips on top. All for about 50 cents American. On my way back to the room, I passed Adam and Brooke and decided to turn around and follow them to whatever meetings they were planning on attending. We rode very quickly through typical crazy Ica traffic and Brooke and I ended up camping out outside the CODEHICA/Proetica office and although Brooke might try to deny it, she totally tried and liked the ¨Dalmation¨ tasty.

Then we went in, met with Leonardo of Proética and spoke in both English and Spanish during the interview. He was eating an helado and it made me really want to go buy one, but I´d already had four kekes and that other treat and that´s pretty much my limit on junk food for the day so I didn´t get one. (Later I ended up buying these animal crackers with giant blobs of hard colored sugar on top plus some little chocolate cookie things for one sol, but you don´t encounter those as often as ice cream so it´s kind of a must. Peruvians really like their ice cream…it´s kind of everywhere.) But anyway, after that, we stopped by this CODEHICA how-to-use-the-internet workshop for a little bit but we were all hungry so we soon left to pick up some breakfast for tomorrow (we´re going to have a very early day- have to be at GTZ at 6:00am and then we are going to Huancavelica and staying overnight there I think).

After this I started off towards dinner with Adam and Brooke behind me. Or at least that´s what I thought. Turns out they had passed me at some point and then when they looked back again, they didn´t see me. I still thought they were behind me, and at one point when I looked back, I didn´t see them. I waited for a bit and then continued on to our favorite dinner spot near the animal cracker store. I sat there for quite a while expecting them to roll around the corner any minute. When they didn´t I figured that they had either run out of traffic-dodging luck or had ditched me for some tallarin verde or lomo saltado or were already home somehow. Either way, I had no money and was kind of hungry. So I went back to the room, grabbed some change and headed back out. On my way to the food, I passed them on the street. ¨Did you get me some sandwiches?¨ I asked. They were too far away on the other side of the street to hear so I went over and asked what they got and where the heck they had gone. Turns out they thought I had gotten lost or ran into a car or ditched them for sandwiches. And took turns searching the Plaza de Armas and the animal cracker area for me. Woops.

So then we got food. A whole lot of food. And then some more. Then I led the way home and again when I turned around, no Adam and Brooke. Oh well. The shower was calling since I hadn´t paid it a visit in…a while. When I emerged all fresh and too clean for all the sand on my roll up mattress pad, I learned that Adam and Brooke were off acquiring more sweet bread and tea. Adam tells me to eat it and so I do, but now I think my stomach is going to explode.”

And so this ends Lindsey´s recap of the day. On to more serious important grownup NGO things from La Brooke and El Adam:”

So this morning, we got to see some cool things. CODEHICA’s office is a media dream. Not only is there a room set up for recording audio for their radio station as well as a place for writing the CODEHICA newspaper, there is also two whole rooms dedicated to television. There is one large room where they record for their Saturday and Sunday television spot that airs a la Good-Morning-America style and a smaller room connected where all the post-production editing occurs. Apparently they go out Monday through Wednesday to collect footage within communities, record their own news anchors on Thursday in the Good-Morning-America room, and then Friday is CRUNCH. Two lucky filmmasters sit around with all the footage from the week and edit it into a one hour version to be aired. Given this rate of editing, our documentary should be completed with a mere twelve days work. Into a twelve hour documentary.

Fruit death toll from this morning: 2 peaches, 3 apples, 6 bananas, 3 oranges, and 1 liter of strawberry yogurt.

We start at 8:40 a.m. at the CODEHICA office where some are in a rush out and others are in a rush in. We are handed off to Rosario for a break down of CODEHICA’s communication defense line. The best way to describe their strategy is as a four-dimensional attack of radio, television, print, and internet (wa-BANG!). They try to diffuse and highlight the opinions of community leaders, “dirigentes,” and elected representatives from local organizations. So they run a radio show five days a week 9-10am, a television spot on Saturdays and Sundays, a newspaper once every two months, and have their internet site updated con frecuencia.

Next, we meet Diana. She is in her third year at UNICA studying communications while doing a three month internship with CODEHICA. She is currently enjoying her work in the printing office, but is nice enough to take some time out of her day to escort us to CODEHICA’s off-site radio broadcasting spot. The set-up for the radio show is not typical. It is a room that is about as big as a wealthy man’s closet. It fits just one dining table with very little room to walk around when the chairs are occupied as well as just enough space for the electronic equipment in a small nook. There are newspapers sprawled across the table, and two very knowledgeable, fast-speaking woman seated across from one another. Words are darting back and forth between them about the government’s reconstruction promises, factory strikes, education, and masculinity. They deftly pass papers, microphones, and cellulars between themselves as one narrates the story and the other queues their reporters on the ground. They simply press their cell phones to the microphone to broadcast. Amidst all this impromptu coordination, a guest shows up to participate. Seamlessly, they incorporate him into the show without missing a beat.

Back at the CODEHICA office, we are passed around to more people to get a more thorough tour of the office. “NGOs are faced with low participation.” In this woman’s book (her name escapes me), this is because people make their problems the NGO’s problem. But the NGO knows that it’s not their problem, it’s the peoples’ problem. They’re just there to help the people help themselves. We also meet Leonardo of Proética after catching a short glimpse of their impressive website. Take a look at http://www.codehica.org.pe/ or http://www.vocesporlareconstruccion.org/ or http://www.reconstruccion.org/ If you scroll down, Proética is one of the participants in this project “Voices for the Reconstruction.” Their website is brimming with intriguing tidbits that will definitely help our report later. Proética’s site looks like it took a lot of foot work and time to develop.

We plan to return again at 3:30 to speak with Leonardo and attend a taller with CODEHICA. On the way home, Adam gleefully purchases a Chicha Morada and Maracuya refresco. He also manages to snag the to-go bags on a bush, losing all of the tasty purple juice to a fight with a plant. Then we contemplate Cuzco, Lima, and that place with a volcano. Then we hit up Internet for some more printing out of real world forms, learning about home, and sending some e-mails to key players for the last phase of our project. This is the part where we lost Lindsay the first time.

The phone cuts through our contemplation, and a voice on the other line informs us that we should meet them in fifteen minutes on Diamond Street. Fishy. Appointments are lined up like soldiers one right after another at 3, 3:30, and 4pm. We lasso our bikes for adventure and slide into homebase for a run. On Diamond Street, GTZ confides further intel concerning our sleepover tomorrow morning. On Avenida Cutervo, Lindsay savors a Dalmation. Brooke also enjoys a bite, but no tanto. Inside the wooden doors of CODEHICA, Leonardo paints a scenic picture of words about Proética work. We are astounded to hear that the incredible website from earlier was the result of two people’s work. Then we are floored to know that it is just 12 people in their office working in all of Peru. He tells us that getting honest, constructive, and critical feedback from the people is going to be impossible to get from the community. In fact, he says that what we are looking to accomplish might not be possible. Communities here are not entirely aware of the meaning behind NGOs, what expectations to have from aid agencies, and will be wary to be critical. Most of all, the communities haven’t had enough experience to grasp the entirety of what should or could be done. We learn that he will be doing encuestas on Sunday so we decide to join him. In addition, he invites us to the movies but we have to politely decline in order to find our way to the CODEHICA Workshop on how to better utilize the Internet.

By the time we arrive at the workshop location, they are still on the basics of learning words like CPU, monitor, keyboard, and USB. We all look at one another and decide to roll out. Then we lose Lindsay again. But we find her so we eat dinner like woah, so it’s cool.

To end the night, we restlessly ride through the streets until we find ourselves somewhere entirely new where we eat tea and fresh pan.

2009-07-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

15th July Wednesday
Southern Huancavelica

Here are some pictures from our day long adventure into the southern tips of the mountains. We saw a meeting with an NGO named PachiMama (which means mother earth in Quechua, the language of the mountains here). We set ourselves up to meet with them to see some of their work in Cuzco while we are there.

More to Come!

Wéré ón góóglé éárth

2009-07-13T16:42:00.000-07:00

13 July, Monday
“This one muffin a day thing just isn't working out.” Says Lindsay as she answers the door with a muffin in her hand, “This is my fifth.”

Check out where we have been via google earth by downloading the .kmz file at this link

We had nothing on our agenda today except the long list of NGOs we have yet to contact. Our goal is to interview and go on a site visit with each of them. So we wake up early this morning and try to be out of the house by 8:30. At 8:45, we are making calls to GTZ to determine when we can go on a site visit with them. Apparently, we are having a sleep over on Wednesday night! Yahoo! We also call the Architectos de la Emergencia. They tell us that they will call us back around noon so we can go with them on a site visit today to a region of Ica where they are building a few schools. By 9:15, we are on the road. So far so good.

We first stop by Cáritas' office which is right off of the Plaza de Armas. We are greeted by the front desk who is also trying to simultaneously deal with several community members who are trickling in from the street. Apparently they are hosting a meeting in their office to have a discussion concerning land titles with the community. She tells us to wait in the hallway where we read the news about an English volunteer working with a group of foreigners in reconstructing Pisco. We have our fears that it might be Pisco Sin Fronteras or M.A.D. because the description fits them perfectly. Yikes! After the director arrives, our meeting results with a scheduled visit to a fair that they are hosting on Saturday. We would have gone with their engineers today, but both are out sick. Que lastima.

Cruz Roja Española. We've so far worked with Cruz Roja Americana and Peruana as well as the International Federation of the Red Cross. However, the funding and projects are different from this Red Cross so we decide that we would like to have an interview with them as well. We get separated, and Brooke learns that her Spanish is now good enough to be alone whilst still managing to get to a said destination. Inside, the three employees who are working take time from their busy schedule to sit down and meet with us, complete with notebooks and attentive ears. They are excited to have some of the raw footage, give us brochures, and make an appointment with us for when we are in Lima in a week. Score. Two out of two.

The next place we want to stop is in Parcona, which is about three or four kilometers outside of Ica proper. The sun is hot today unlike other days when there are clouds, and Peru is cold. I guess it's winter so I should have expected it. The mountains and desert make the temperature swings in the morning to afternoon somewhat more extreme than would be expected. When we arrive, we search around in vain on Calle Tacna. Which exists, but without any NGO to be found. So we call the MCLCP office to determine what mischief is afoot only to be informed that the office is actually just off the Plaza de Armas in Ica proper.

So we turn around. By the time we arrive at 1 p.m., no one is present due to lunch break. We are feeling a little tired so we stop to make a few more phone calls to Casas de la Salud and APORTES to reschedule our interviews which were planned for Wednesday or Thursday. Thankfully, they have time on Friday. Again, we search in vain, but this time for tripods. For about fifteen minutes. Then we give up because we are being turned in circles. Then we return home to Lindsay.

Who is watching a Vin Diesel movie while munching on some Ahi de Gallina, milk, muffins, soup, and probably more things I can't recall. She tells us about her crazy adventures out and about (crazy, yet tame and entirely safe) to Plaza Vea and in the city. Her valiant rides through the streets, her skilled darting through shopping aisles, and sharp eyes for deals. Her ultimate obstacle, her dragon, if you will: the choice between muffins or animal crackers. The man standing beside her mentions that both are very tasty. True, true, Lindsay thinks to herself. But one is more moist and oh so much more delicious than the other, comments the man next to her again. And so...

Muffins it was.

We listen intently to her tale, hanging off her every word. And then we do some normal organizing, typing, uploading, branstorming. Because we just don't already have enough work to do for ourselves. We start to think about the site visits that we will embark on in the upcoming week and make up a worksheet to make sure that we extract all the information we can. Now we are making sure we are prepared for our next five full days with charged batteries and free hard drive space. Like Batman and his utility belt except now it's Adam and a backpack we've so endearingly named, Choche. Thanks for reading Choche, we miss you!
We have most of the things done that we need for the upcoming week. Now we will think about the week that will come after Cuzco. This is our home stretch of summers. Where we put out heads on straight and cross our fingers. We'll return to Lima for some interviews from a theoretical standpoint in clean offices far from the affected area. Then we will come back to the ground to get our hands dirty and have our camera's cup floweth over