Friday, 10 July
“If there were two of us three who were going to suck on a dog’s teet, it’d be you two.”
“If you took her out of the sleeping bag but left the three pigs, could you have pigs in a blanket?” “No, because she is like aji, it adds that certain necessary something that I just don’t like.”
One alarm
Two alarms
Three alarms, no more
Two people on a mattress while
One is on the floor
Today, the girls rise with the sun
And the boy remains until shopping’s done
We return with sweets and fruit
While Adam sleeps like a brute
The crumbs burst and scatter
As we eat with a clatter
Finishing our loot
Some of us try to shower
If we have the power
To muster up might
To win the fight
Against a temperature we find sour
The camera broke
Who knew it would croak
But the repair was quick and spicy
Now we’ll take care
For who wouldn’t dare
To treat it oh so nice-y
Although rhyming is fun
This entry would never be done
If we kept going
It’d be quite slowing
To write a poem like this one
In the morning, it never fails that one of us is still asleep while the other two go out to get breakfast. We have very carefully developed a game called guess-the-price-of-that-food for when everyone gathers round to eat. Yesterday morning, Lindsey was off by 1 sole or so. This morning, Adam was off by 0 centimos. Every day, we get better at approximating what food should cost in the market that is conveniently located a stone’s throw away from our apartment. Which is helpful since we are becoming better at market prices and determining when we are being ripped off for being gringos.
Afterwards, we head out to the Plaza and leave Lauren behind to a luxurious shower of cold water. My favorite part of the morning is leaving on bike to dive into the streets of Ica. Cars here keep enough space from the sides of the roads to allow for some gnarly traffic weaving. Bumps in the road are exhilarating at full speed. The cranks of our bikes are eating our hard work, and you can hear the chains straining under the weight of our feet now. It seems as though they are overdue for an oil change. In addition, taxi drivers here have the fastest reflexes of any one that I have ever witnessed. What Americans might consider a game of chicken is normal practice here. Let’s just call it fun.
Since our camera broke down, we got to file our first insurance claim ever. It is probably some of the easiest paper work I’ve done for business purposes. Unfortunately, the situation is one of the most complicated I’ve had to describe to a touch tone phone menu. Press 1 for the sales department. Press 6 for the insurance department. Press 0 if we have not yet described the nature of your call to speak with a representative. This call may be monitored for quality insurance purposes. Please hold.
So we held. And they advised us to get the camera fixed here in Peru. So we did. Yesterday, I was prepared to be without a camera until August. Today, they inform us that the camera was simply malfunctioning normally. How delightful to live in a world where products are designed to have short lifespans and “typical malfunctions.” In the meantime, we made more copies of our NGO interviewing worksheet since we have been blowing through them at record rates. Thankfully, we’ve managed to standardize our interviews into a sheet so we can arrange all responses into a large matrix for comparison purposes. We have also been able to start to develop NGO profiles complete with event records, community surveys, and interviews that pertain to each organization.
While riding one handed and using the other to pat ourselves on the back, we roll into to the Plaza de Armas like gangsters looking for trouble. So much trouble, we decide to just ride up on the sidewalk, next to the fountains, in front of the guy mopping the concrete, and right past the police who stare at us incredulously. Then the mob comes complete with pitchforks and fire in their eyes. This is a clean city. A city where bikes stay on the streets. This is a pristine city. A city where there are people in suits. While we desperately try to explain that we just want to be close to our bikes while making business phone calls, another policeman walks up. She is more pristine than the city. In fact, her shoes sparkle and you can smell the starch in the sharp creases of her uniform. She is the tourist police. Just like in Guatemala. Thank you ma’am.
So we make phone calls in the Plaza de Armas. Smugly.
We make up a list of five or six addresses to visit today. We’ll just play it all by ear starting with … CODEHICA, Comisión de Derechos Humanos de Ica. Note to self, that’s the Commission for Human Rights in the region of Ica. Pronounced así: Co-Day-Ee-kah.
A note on asking for directions in Peru. You get two types of people. One type knows and will give you overly detailed directions. These people, we say yes thank you very much we’ll get there no don’t worry thank you. All those words are spoken as we are in motion away from them as they explain for the third time with different landmarks. The other type are those who think they know where our destination is. They say, thatta way a little and then like turn this way and maybe twirl once or twice for good luck. These are the kinds of people that we run into most. For future reference, CODEHICA is over there a bit, which is where we finally found ourselves.
Padre José Manuel has the eyes of a man who really cares, says Adam. He has the schedule of a man who can spare an hour of talking to random university students who walk in unexpectedly. We’ve seen CODEHICA in many different places that we’ve worked already. They usually come as a single volunteer that has a presence during participatory budgets to ensure that it is run fairly or during elections to act as a guarantee of its democracy. We’ve seen them at least three times in the past. Probably more since they are like silent guardian angels that look after the people of Peru.
CODEHICA was founded in 1982 by a group of people that included the man we were interviewing. He seemed proud of this fact, but not overly so, His answered were saturated in experience, and the organization offered us a window into new ways of communication that we have yet to encounter. CODEHICA runs a radio and television station which broadcasts the opinions and ideas of the community here. We will be finding out more next week. In addition, they have talleres on topics like “using the Internet” or ¨Equal employment for the handicapped.” In some sense, their topics seem much more advanced than what we’ve been encountering. It is far beyond wash-your-hands – here have some soap and a towel. The programs that they offer, however, covers a wide variety of topics. They build houses of the temporary and permanent source, protect life against dictatorships, work against armed violence, protecting democracy, increasing political transparency, and developing local government capacity.
After we set up more appointments to do site visits as well as tape a radio show, we stand on the second floor to stare at the view. I’d like to call it a moment of reflection. During this internalization of information, we spy with our little eyes a church called Iglesia Lurin. One side of it is tall and stands like a proud soldier. The other has a crumpled tower and an ashamed slanted face. We eat mandarins next to it. We take pictures like tourists. We make phone calls to more NGOs who tell us to call back in ten minutes. So we eat mandarins and take more pictures. In these small experiences, I feel as though I am making acquaintances with stories that I’ll never know. It reminds me somewhat of people, things, and places that you can’t entirely understand without time and distance. Or maybe time and endurance. From afar, this building is lined with iron fencing. But something squeezes between those bars and radiates past. There are things you can’t really know without putting them under a microscope. There are other things that you can’t really know unless you are able to see it in context. With the church framed in the lens of the camera, we saw it poise itself to tell stories of the people it had supported through the earthquake, the aid that it provided to the affected community, and the symbol of remembrance it offered.
Then we call Aportes who says, we’re busy right now and we’re headed to a site visit but you can come if you want, but we’re going soon. Y entonces, fuimos a APORTES para ver su trabajo de campo. Even though they are busy and getting ready to leave, they manage to offer us a glass of coca-cola, provide us with a fifteen minute documentary of their NGO, and let us use their bathroom. This is a good sign of the work we are about to see.
APORTES is primarily working in La Nueva Esparanza (The New Hope). Here, they are constructing houses from CMU blocks. FYI, for your information, CMU stands for concrete masonry units. Why do you care? I don’t know. In short, this was one of the coolest site visits that we’ve ever gone on por culpa de la pequeña fiesta. Lined with houses in various stages of completion, the entire street was hard at work. APORTES has a system where they employ certain people in the beneficiary families to build homes. This auto-construction technique seems to work very well since the houses end up being completed in twenty days or something por allí.
As with a cake, the very finishing touch is the tip-top. Nice to meet you Traditional Peru. When the roof is put on top of the house, there is alarge celebration. The owner ties a bottle of wine and flowers to his front door. A mototaxi with the dueño’s wife and a large pot of food arrives. Everyone gathers for a speech by Aportes who offers blessings of security, fidelity, and good luck. Then the neighborhood ceases to make construction noises as people put down screwdrivers, power tools, and their shovels. Ingrid holds a hammer up in her hand, and swings while squeezing her eyes closed tightly. And it … doesn’t break. So some guy has to come over to help her shatter glass and alcohol all over his newly constructed home. Then everyone rushes in to sit, pass around beer, and be fed delicious food in celebration. Que bueno.
We also check out the Casa de Sonrisas, a community center built and initially run by APORTES, which is largely a psicosocial NGO. This space is dedicated to afterschool programs for children as well as mothers and fathers workshops. We asked the lady getting ready to run the womens´meeting what kinds of things they discussed. ¨Sexual Assertiveness¨, and ¨Menstrual hygience¨. OK, says Adam. Alright, says Brooke. Goodbye says Lorena.
Since its beginning, the community members have been handed over control of the meetings that are run. They now have an executive committee for operations but are still dependent on materials (understandably) from APORTES. In December, if they pass, they will be handed over full control and all the materials. From talking to the ladies it seems that they certainly find the information from the workshops useful and also enjoy hearing and sharing input with other members of their neighborhood.
We head back home around sunset and get to know Ingrid better. She is an energetic member of the APORTES team and Brooke gets Spanish practice setting up an interview with her and discussing everything from star signs to restaurants to dune buggies. Al llegar at the NGO base, we bike back towards our place, stopping only to treat ourselves to some pie de manzana.
During the course of the day, Lorena had managed to acquire an array of intriguing videos including a plethora of Michael Jackson music videos and Angelina Jolie movies. We eat some fruit and get some tea. The tea had alfalfa in it. It was too sweet though. Poor alfalfa. From there we settle down to upload all the film and organize our data from the day. We are quickly running out of hard drive space, and we don’t know where to find soft drives. Lorena remembered seeing a place in Chincha where they sell semi-squishy drives so we may have to go back there.
And then there were 4 pages. And they saw that it was good. ish. At least the poem was good, you have to give Brooke that.
Thursday, 9 July
¨Do you think there is some sort of dog hierarchy around here, and the ones with the sweaters tell the others what to do?¨
Ica is known for its large sand dunes. The city is built around an oasis called Huacachina, which is in the middle of the coastal desert region of Peru. Tourists come by to drive dune buggies and wear sunglasses. We´re not staying near the tourists, but we happen to have a dune a couple blocks down from us, that is surrounded by homes facing the opposite direction. So lonely it looked (says Yoda) that we decided to take a detour from our morning jog to scale it like a fish.
Have you ever tried spitting on a dune. Highly recommended. Also recommended is creating lahar slides. Oh and you should also watch the Grant Hill NBA Sensation film because it is transformative.
On the way back we stopped at the market Arenales – which we now know the name of thanks to our new friend, Yanet Hernández, from the settlement outside of Guadalupe. We played a game called ´we only have 5 soles for breakfast´ and ended up with a decent array of 8 small bananas, 3 apples, an avocado (it was the most expensive, least ripe, and least touched purchase), a chunk of queso, 16 little breads, spinach, and spicy sauce.
After the breakfast we headed over to run some errands including shopping for oh-so-needed batteries, water, animal crackers, helado, internet, hard drive and insurance calls. From there we spent approximately 2 hours in a brainstorming session. Into the session we brought only our original project proposal, some blank pages, pens and 3 sparkling minds. The event location was determined by a small sign outside a restaurant that read ¨Menú, ají de gallina.¨ Ají de gallina means ¨Tasty, enter here.¨ So we did.
Over a meal of deliciousness and a bottella of Cristal we discussed what each others thoughts were on our progress, and what we should focus on moving forward. We concluded that we were performing a decent job interviewing NGO coordinators which was providing us with a nice smattering of the reconstruction work being done in the various regions most affected by the earthquake. We do not however feel that our community surveys are effective enough in capturing quality opinions from the places where NGOs are working. We decide to focus a bit more on interviewing community leaders both informal and formal alike. This seems to be a good idea since they are often the ones who have more keen personalities and have also interacted much more with NGOs and coordination amongst the community in general.
We also discuss more about how to use the rest of our time here. We agree that we want to develop a new method for helping improve some component of the communication between NGOs and the beneficiary communities. How best to do this is the $2 question. We conclude that we would like to either focus on how beneficiaries for homes are chosen or how evaluation of projects is conducted. To do this we are thinking of partnering with some institution not personally involved in working in the area to do a workshop with community leaders and youth with the goal of learning one specific neighborhoods experience with NGO communication in this particular component. The details will be mulled over the following week or so and will be carried out over the course of August.
With thunderstormed brains we head over to one of our few interviews with community leaders. We are excited to see how it works out. The interviewee is named Yanet Hernández and she meets us at the tienda near her home. Here we conduct the interview and she gives expectedly better information than we have been receiving by our random surveys we have been conducting up till now. She mentions that the housing project in her town involved no community members in the selection of the beneficiaries and that she would be interested in seeing NGOs evaluate projects after they are finished. Granted they have had mostly short-term aid in the form of donations.
From the interview we head over to the local Vaso de Leche, a government subsidized program for providing families with daily quantaties of milky, steaming quaker proportional to the number of children in the home. Yanet fills her small pot and heads home. That is when Lorena met them. Smiling and energetic, dark-haired and respectful, inquisitive and playful. Lucero, Kiara, Oscar, and Rosa – Yanet´s gorgeous children. Lorena spends the rest of the visit playing with the children and trading pictures of them for kisses. Oh, the language that is transaction.
Dinner is the standard sautéed noodles and chicken soup, but the treat is Michael Jackson videos streaming on the TV in the background. Smooth Criminal, Thriller, and Scream provide us with enough entertainment and amazement that even after getting back to the room, Brooke cannot get Mike outta her head.
Then we do something really new and exciting – we upload footage and go over old footage to standardize the NGO event notes a bit more.
Wednesday, 8 July
“When I hear the glorious music, I'll know that my ice cream lady is nigh.”
“Why are these gringos in my calle?”
“Brooke, are your parents named River and Stream?”
The market is closed this morning. Adam has to cycle thrice the expected distance to find hot quaker – too hot apparently because the womenfolk take too long drinking it and force us to rush to make our 9am meeting with GTZ. GTZ stands for something in German that is equivalent of cooperation between German government and developing nations. They have a special arrangement with Peru especially to do water projects nationwide.
GTZ is not an NGO, it is an institution funded strictly by government ministries within Germany and also the EU. It may be the German equivalent of USAID but more focused on permanent development relationships with developing nations. I can't think of the actual equivalent US branch, if you think of it, comment it in so Lindsey doesn't have to look it up
GTZ is in a ritzy neighborhood, everyone is nicely dressed and relaxed, friendly and inviting, and the showerhead of the bathroom has muliple settings. We are wearing some clothes that used to be white, and Brooke feels self-conscious about the holes in her jeans. The interview we showed up for was with an Architect Project Manager named Lucia Ramos Cuba. It goes well. It is one of the more formal interviews yet, and it is clear that this organization has been working many years doing development in the region with well-educated leaders. We can't help but wonder what they are like in the field. The field is not well-educated. Does that mean that when the tall Germans walk in they feel more intimidated? Do the office workers send field workers to the field?
After the interview, we attempt to set up a time for a site visit to one of their projects. We may be going next week, was the response we received from the engineer who worked under the Project Coordinator Piet Van Driel. Maybe we are right, and they aren't the ones going into the field as much.
After a tour of the office we head home. Brooke says, “Let's take this road.” So we do. Everything is closed. Noon. Siesta? Up ahead we see burning black mounds and smoke with large stones all scatttered across the road. A group of approximately 20 guys dressed in jeans and t-shirts are loudly running around like a non-domesticated school of fish. As we near the intersection, rocks are thrown. Crash. They hit the frame of a mototaxi trying to get around the burning debris. The school of fish goes after it with verbal curses and presumably force the mototaxi driver into paying to be released, under strict orders to not make any money today.
It dawns on us: today is the national strike by the transportation industry in response to overly-hefty fines being leveled against motorists. This was why the market was closed as well. As we slow down a safe distance away but still in eyeshot of the frantic scene, we film from afar, listening to the sounds of sirens thick in the air. There were very few motorists on the road, mostly individuals on motorcycles with families or taxis that turned around on the dime as soon as they neared the scrambled omelet made up of smouldering tires, gleeful strikers, and curious bystanders. The sirens approached more quickly and three motorbikes invaded the scene, followed by a black pick -up truck spilling over with policia in the back. You would expect them to be synchronized swimmers as they hop out one right after the other and into the streets. Big black boots kick through the air, shooing the strikers like you might shoo a dog who is trying to eat dinner scraps from the table.
The entire thing doesn't take all that long. By the time the police are done pushing burning trash out of the way, incoming traffic is flowing smoothly through the intersection. Like butter on a communication sandwich. So we turn to go home through empty streets that are littered with bricks, some patches of broken glass, and small bags of trash. Of course, Brooke gets a flat tire which forces us to walk past the people playing cards, cooking outside, and hanging out in the streets. This town would be decidedly much nicer to be in if there was a strike everyday. That way people could lounge about in the streets all day, talking about strikes and political topics. On our way back, we encounter a group at an intersection receive a box of bananas which is promptly invaded. Every one pumps their fists and bananas in the air, toasting the success of keeping cars from passing. But not us, oh no. We walk right on by and to our street.
Hey street. Hey guys. What did you do today? Saw a strike. Yeah? Yeah. Cool.
Brooke sets off to fix her first flat of the trip. Hopefully we can avoid any more. Adam heads back into town to find some lunch. Lindsey (who has confessed she was once named “the slug” her freshman year of college) reclines in bed reading a structures book. Then we all sit in the sun and eat from improvised dishes made up of bottom bottoms for bowls, bottle tops as funnels for soup, and plastic/banana plate for our chicken and rice. The sun feels good. As we start to slow down, music floats from around the corner. A recognizable melody that perks Lindsey's nose from normal to flaring nostrils. Complete with a smile from ear to ear. The ice cream lady pedals around in her dashing yellow uniform, dutifully stopping for an eager costumer. I can see the gears turning in Lindsey's head... chocolate chip or chocolate chip? She decides on chocolate chip, triumphantly turning to us with proper reassurance that the world wants her to have ice cream. “I thought that if I stayed near the room today, I wouldn't be able to find any. Apparently, the world found me instead.” “There goes the world....”, down the street and off into the distance, an unbearably long ways away by the time she finishes and starts to crave another.
Then we work on catching up with more footage, and figuring out how to manage our somewhat non-functioning camera. This leads us on a wild goose chase through town to find a repair shop and a clothing outlet to purchase non-hole jeans. Everyone we stopped at for video repairs pointed the finger in a new direction so we ended up with a new pair of pants and no más. One of us stayed to do a big batch of laundry, scrubbing until their hands hurt.
Afterwards, we assume Sisyphus' position and push the rock up the hill once more, sorting our footage and diving face first into our laptops. We all nod off as the flash drives blink, still attached to the computer as it plays video.
“If there were two of us three who were going to suck on a dog’s teet, it’d be you two.”
“If you took her out of the sleeping bag but left the three pigs, could you have pigs in a blanket?” “No, because she is like aji, it adds that certain necessary something that I just don’t like.”
One alarm
Two alarms
Three alarms, no more
Two people on a mattress while
One is on the floor
Today, the girls rise with the sun
And the boy remains until shopping’s done
We return with sweets and fruit
While Adam sleeps like a brute
The crumbs burst and scatter
As we eat with a clatter
Finishing our loot
Some of us try to shower
If we have the power
To muster up might
To win the fight
Against a temperature we find sour
The camera broke
Who knew it would croak
But the repair was quick and spicy
Now we’ll take care
For who wouldn’t dare
To treat it oh so nice-y
Although rhyming is fun
This entry would never be done
If we kept going
It’d be quite slowing
To write a poem like this one
In the morning, it never fails that one of us is still asleep while the other two go out to get breakfast. We have very carefully developed a game called guess-the-price-of-that-food for when everyone gathers round to eat. Yesterday morning, Lindsey was off by 1 sole or so. This morning, Adam was off by 0 centimos. Every day, we get better at approximating what food should cost in the market that is conveniently located a stone’s throw away from our apartment. Which is helpful since we are becoming better at market prices and determining when we are being ripped off for being gringos.
Afterwards, we head out to the Plaza and leave Lauren behind to a luxurious shower of cold water. My favorite part of the morning is leaving on bike to dive into the streets of Ica. Cars here keep enough space from the sides of the roads to allow for some gnarly traffic weaving. Bumps in the road are exhilarating at full speed. The cranks of our bikes are eating our hard work, and you can hear the chains straining under the weight of our feet now. It seems as though they are overdue for an oil change. In addition, taxi drivers here have the fastest reflexes of any one that I have ever witnessed. What Americans might consider a game of chicken is normal practice here. Let’s just call it fun.
Since our camera broke down, we got to file our first insurance claim ever. It is probably some of the easiest paper work I’ve done for business purposes. Unfortunately, the situation is one of the most complicated I’ve had to describe to a touch tone phone menu. Press 1 for the sales department. Press 6 for the insurance department. Press 0 if we have not yet described the nature of your call to speak with a representative. This call may be monitored for quality insurance purposes. Please hold.
So we held. And they advised us to get the camera fixed here in Peru. So we did. Yesterday, I was prepared to be without a camera until August. Today, they inform us that the camera was simply malfunctioning normally. How delightful to live in a world where products are designed to have short lifespans and “typical malfunctions.” In the meantime, we made more copies of our NGO interviewing worksheet since we have been blowing through them at record rates. Thankfully, we’ve managed to standardize our interviews into a sheet so we can arrange all responses into a large matrix for comparison purposes. We have also been able to start to develop NGO profiles complete with event records, community surveys, and interviews that pertain to each organization.
While riding one handed and using the other to pat ourselves on the back, we roll into to the Plaza de Armas like gangsters looking for trouble. So much trouble, we decide to just ride up on the sidewalk, next to the fountains, in front of the guy mopping the concrete, and right past the police who stare at us incredulously. Then the mob comes complete with pitchforks and fire in their eyes. This is a clean city. A city where bikes stay on the streets. This is a pristine city. A city where there are people in suits. While we desperately try to explain that we just want to be close to our bikes while making business phone calls, another policeman walks up. She is more pristine than the city. In fact, her shoes sparkle and you can smell the starch in the sharp creases of her uniform. She is the tourist police. Just like in Guatemala. Thank you ma’am.
So we make phone calls in the Plaza de Armas. Smugly.
We make up a list of five or six addresses to visit today. We’ll just play it all by ear starting with … CODEHICA, Comisión de Derechos Humanos de Ica. Note to self, that’s the Commission for Human Rights in the region of Ica. Pronounced así: Co-Day-Ee-kah.
A note on asking for directions in Peru. You get two types of people. One type knows and will give you overly detailed directions. These people, we say yes thank you very much we’ll get there no don’t worry thank you. All those words are spoken as we are in motion away from them as they explain for the third time with different landmarks. The other type are those who think they know where our destination is. They say, thatta way a little and then like turn this way and maybe twirl once or twice for good luck. These are the kinds of people that we run into most. For future reference, CODEHICA is over there a bit, which is where we finally found ourselves.
Padre José Manuel has the eyes of a man who really cares, says Adam. He has the schedule of a man who can spare an hour of talking to random university students who walk in unexpectedly. We’ve seen CODEHICA in many different places that we’ve worked already. They usually come as a single volunteer that has a presence during participatory budgets to ensure that it is run fairly or during elections to act as a guarantee of its democracy. We’ve seen them at least three times in the past. Probably more since they are like silent guardian angels that look after the people of Peru.
CODEHICA was founded in 1982 by a group of people that included the man we were interviewing. He seemed proud of this fact, but not overly so, His answered were saturated in experience, and the organization offered us a window into new ways of communication that we have yet to encounter. CODEHICA runs a radio and television station which broadcasts the opinions and ideas of the community here. We will be finding out more next week. In addition, they have talleres on topics like “using the Internet” or ¨Equal employment for the handicapped.” In some sense, their topics seem much more advanced than what we’ve been encountering. It is far beyond wash-your-hands – here have some soap and a towel. The programs that they offer, however, covers a wide variety of topics. They build houses of the temporary and permanent source, protect life against dictatorships, work against armed violence, protecting democracy, increasing political transparency, and developing local government capacity.
After we set up more appointments to do site visits as well as tape a radio show, we stand on the second floor to stare at the view. I’d like to call it a moment of reflection. During this internalization of information, we spy with our little eyes a church called Iglesia Lurin. One side of it is tall and stands like a proud soldier. The other has a crumpled tower and an ashamed slanted face. We eat mandarins next to it. We take pictures like tourists. We make phone calls to more NGOs who tell us to call back in ten minutes. So we eat mandarins and take more pictures. In these small experiences, I feel as though I am making acquaintances with stories that I’ll never know. It reminds me somewhat of people, things, and places that you can’t entirely understand without time and distance. Or maybe time and endurance. From afar, this building is lined with iron fencing. But something squeezes between those bars and radiates past. There are things you can’t really know without putting them under a microscope. There are other things that you can’t really know unless you are able to see it in context. With the church framed in the lens of the camera, we saw it poise itself to tell stories of the people it had supported through the earthquake, the aid that it provided to the affected community, and the symbol of remembrance it offered.
Then we call Aportes who says, we’re busy right now and we’re headed to a site visit but you can come if you want, but we’re going soon. Y entonces, fuimos a APORTES para ver su trabajo de campo. Even though they are busy and getting ready to leave, they manage to offer us a glass of coca-cola, provide us with a fifteen minute documentary of their NGO, and let us use their bathroom. This is a good sign of the work we are about to see.
APORTES is primarily working in La Nueva Esparanza (The New Hope). Here, they are constructing houses from CMU blocks. FYI, for your information, CMU stands for concrete masonry units. Why do you care? I don’t know. In short, this was one of the coolest site visits that we’ve ever gone on por culpa de la pequeña fiesta. Lined with houses in various stages of completion, the entire street was hard at work. APORTES has a system where they employ certain people in the beneficiary families to build homes. This auto-construction technique seems to work very well since the houses end up being completed in twenty days or something por allí.
As with a cake, the very finishing touch is the tip-top. Nice to meet you Traditional Peru. When the roof is put on top of the house, there is alarge celebration. The owner ties a bottle of wine and flowers to his front door. A mototaxi with the dueño’s wife and a large pot of food arrives. Everyone gathers for a speech by Aportes who offers blessings of security, fidelity, and good luck. Then the neighborhood ceases to make construction noises as people put down screwdrivers, power tools, and their shovels. Ingrid holds a hammer up in her hand, and swings while squeezing her eyes closed tightly. And it … doesn’t break. So some guy has to come over to help her shatter glass and alcohol all over his newly constructed home. Then everyone rushes in to sit, pass around beer, and be fed delicious food in celebration. Que bueno.
We also check out the Casa de Sonrisas, a community center built and initially run by APORTES, which is largely a psicosocial NGO. This space is dedicated to afterschool programs for children as well as mothers and fathers workshops. We asked the lady getting ready to run the womens´meeting what kinds of things they discussed. ¨Sexual Assertiveness¨, and ¨Menstrual hygience¨. OK, says Adam. Alright, says Brooke. Goodbye says Lorena.
Since its beginning, the community members have been handed over control of the meetings that are run. They now have an executive committee for operations but are still dependent on materials (understandably) from APORTES. In December, if they pass, they will be handed over full control and all the materials. From talking to the ladies it seems that they certainly find the information from the workshops useful and also enjoy hearing and sharing input with other members of their neighborhood.
We head back home around sunset and get to know Ingrid better. She is an energetic member of the APORTES team and Brooke gets Spanish practice setting up an interview with her and discussing everything from star signs to restaurants to dune buggies. Al llegar at the NGO base, we bike back towards our place, stopping only to treat ourselves to some pie de manzana.
During the course of the day, Lorena had managed to acquire an array of intriguing videos including a plethora of Michael Jackson music videos and Angelina Jolie movies. We eat some fruit and get some tea. The tea had alfalfa in it. It was too sweet though. Poor alfalfa. From there we settle down to upload all the film and organize our data from the day. We are quickly running out of hard drive space, and we don’t know where to find soft drives. Lorena remembered seeing a place in Chincha where they sell semi-squishy drives so we may have to go back there.
And then there were 4 pages. And they saw that it was good. ish. At least the poem was good, you have to give Brooke that.
Thursday, 9 July
¨Do you think there is some sort of dog hierarchy around here, and the ones with the sweaters tell the others what to do?¨
Ica is known for its large sand dunes. The city is built around an oasis called Huacachina, which is in the middle of the coastal desert region of Peru. Tourists come by to drive dune buggies and wear sunglasses. We´re not staying near the tourists, but we happen to have a dune a couple blocks down from us, that is surrounded by homes facing the opposite direction. So lonely it looked (says Yoda) that we decided to take a detour from our morning jog to scale it like a fish.
Have you ever tried spitting on a dune. Highly recommended. Also recommended is creating lahar slides. Oh and you should also watch the Grant Hill NBA Sensation film because it is transformative.
On the way back we stopped at the market Arenales – which we now know the name of thanks to our new friend, Yanet Hernández, from the settlement outside of Guadalupe. We played a game called ´we only have 5 soles for breakfast´ and ended up with a decent array of 8 small bananas, 3 apples, an avocado (it was the most expensive, least ripe, and least touched purchase), a chunk of queso, 16 little breads, spinach, and spicy sauce.
After the breakfast we headed over to run some errands including shopping for oh-so-needed batteries, water, animal crackers, helado, internet, hard drive and insurance calls. From there we spent approximately 2 hours in a brainstorming session. Into the session we brought only our original project proposal, some blank pages, pens and 3 sparkling minds. The event location was determined by a small sign outside a restaurant that read ¨Menú, ají de gallina.¨ Ají de gallina means ¨Tasty, enter here.¨ So we did.
Over a meal of deliciousness and a bottella of Cristal we discussed what each others thoughts were on our progress, and what we should focus on moving forward. We concluded that we were performing a decent job interviewing NGO coordinators which was providing us with a nice smattering of the reconstruction work being done in the various regions most affected by the earthquake. We do not however feel that our community surveys are effective enough in capturing quality opinions from the places where NGOs are working. We decide to focus a bit more on interviewing community leaders both informal and formal alike. This seems to be a good idea since they are often the ones who have more keen personalities and have also interacted much more with NGOs and coordination amongst the community in general.
We also discuss more about how to use the rest of our time here. We agree that we want to develop a new method for helping improve some component of the communication between NGOs and the beneficiary communities. How best to do this is the $2 question. We conclude that we would like to either focus on how beneficiaries for homes are chosen or how evaluation of projects is conducted. To do this we are thinking of partnering with some institution not personally involved in working in the area to do a workshop with community leaders and youth with the goal of learning one specific neighborhoods experience with NGO communication in this particular component. The details will be mulled over the following week or so and will be carried out over the course of August.
With thunderstormed brains we head over to one of our few interviews with community leaders. We are excited to see how it works out. The interviewee is named Yanet Hernández and she meets us at the tienda near her home. Here we conduct the interview and she gives expectedly better information than we have been receiving by our random surveys we have been conducting up till now. She mentions that the housing project in her town involved no community members in the selection of the beneficiaries and that she would be interested in seeing NGOs evaluate projects after they are finished. Granted they have had mostly short-term aid in the form of donations.
From the interview we head over to the local Vaso de Leche, a government subsidized program for providing families with daily quantaties of milky, steaming quaker proportional to the number of children in the home. Yanet fills her small pot and heads home. That is when Lorena met them. Smiling and energetic, dark-haired and respectful, inquisitive and playful. Lucero, Kiara, Oscar, and Rosa – Yanet´s gorgeous children. Lorena spends the rest of the visit playing with the children and trading pictures of them for kisses. Oh, the language that is transaction.
Dinner is the standard sautéed noodles and chicken soup, but the treat is Michael Jackson videos streaming on the TV in the background. Smooth Criminal, Thriller, and Scream provide us with enough entertainment and amazement that even after getting back to the room, Brooke cannot get Mike outta her head.
Then we do something really new and exciting – we upload footage and go over old footage to standardize the NGO event notes a bit more.
Wednesday, 8 July
“When I hear the glorious music, I'll know that my ice cream lady is nigh.”
“Why are these gringos in my calle?”
“Brooke, are your parents named River and Stream?”
The market is closed this morning. Adam has to cycle thrice the expected distance to find hot quaker – too hot apparently because the womenfolk take too long drinking it and force us to rush to make our 9am meeting with GTZ. GTZ stands for something in German that is equivalent of cooperation between German government and developing nations. They have a special arrangement with Peru especially to do water projects nationwide.
GTZ is not an NGO, it is an institution funded strictly by government ministries within Germany and also the EU. It may be the German equivalent of USAID but more focused on permanent development relationships with developing nations. I can't think of the actual equivalent US branch, if you think of it, comment it in so Lindsey doesn't have to look it up
GTZ is in a ritzy neighborhood, everyone is nicely dressed and relaxed, friendly and inviting, and the showerhead of the bathroom has muliple settings. We are wearing some clothes that used to be white, and Brooke feels self-conscious about the holes in her jeans. The interview we showed up for was with an Architect Project Manager named Lucia Ramos Cuba. It goes well. It is one of the more formal interviews yet, and it is clear that this organization has been working many years doing development in the region with well-educated leaders. We can't help but wonder what they are like in the field. The field is not well-educated. Does that mean that when the tall Germans walk in they feel more intimidated? Do the office workers send field workers to the field?
After the interview, we attempt to set up a time for a site visit to one of their projects. We may be going next week, was the response we received from the engineer who worked under the Project Coordinator Piet Van Driel. Maybe we are right, and they aren't the ones going into the field as much.
After a tour of the office we head home. Brooke says, “Let's take this road.” So we do. Everything is closed. Noon. Siesta? Up ahead we see burning black mounds and smoke with large stones all scatttered across the road. A group of approximately 20 guys dressed in jeans and t-shirts are loudly running around like a non-domesticated school of fish. As we near the intersection, rocks are thrown. Crash. They hit the frame of a mototaxi trying to get around the burning debris. The school of fish goes after it with verbal curses and presumably force the mototaxi driver into paying to be released, under strict orders to not make any money today.
It dawns on us: today is the national strike by the transportation industry in response to overly-hefty fines being leveled against motorists. This was why the market was closed as well. As we slow down a safe distance away but still in eyeshot of the frantic scene, we film from afar, listening to the sounds of sirens thick in the air. There were very few motorists on the road, mostly individuals on motorcycles with families or taxis that turned around on the dime as soon as they neared the scrambled omelet made up of smouldering tires, gleeful strikers, and curious bystanders. The sirens approached more quickly and three motorbikes invaded the scene, followed by a black pick -up truck spilling over with policia in the back. You would expect them to be synchronized swimmers as they hop out one right after the other and into the streets. Big black boots kick through the air, shooing the strikers like you might shoo a dog who is trying to eat dinner scraps from the table.
The entire thing doesn't take all that long. By the time the police are done pushing burning trash out of the way, incoming traffic is flowing smoothly through the intersection. Like butter on a communication sandwich. So we turn to go home through empty streets that are littered with bricks, some patches of broken glass, and small bags of trash. Of course, Brooke gets a flat tire which forces us to walk past the people playing cards, cooking outside, and hanging out in the streets. This town would be decidedly much nicer to be in if there was a strike everyday. That way people could lounge about in the streets all day, talking about strikes and political topics. On our way back, we encounter a group at an intersection receive a box of bananas which is promptly invaded. Every one pumps their fists and bananas in the air, toasting the success of keeping cars from passing. But not us, oh no. We walk right on by and to our street.
Hey street. Hey guys. What did you do today? Saw a strike. Yeah? Yeah. Cool.
Brooke sets off to fix her first flat of the trip. Hopefully we can avoid any more. Adam heads back into town to find some lunch. Lindsey (who has confessed she was once named “the slug” her freshman year of college) reclines in bed reading a structures book. Then we all sit in the sun and eat from improvised dishes made up of bottom bottoms for bowls, bottle tops as funnels for soup, and plastic/banana plate for our chicken and rice. The sun feels good. As we start to slow down, music floats from around the corner. A recognizable melody that perks Lindsey's nose from normal to flaring nostrils. Complete with a smile from ear to ear. The ice cream lady pedals around in her dashing yellow uniform, dutifully stopping for an eager costumer. I can see the gears turning in Lindsey's head... chocolate chip or chocolate chip? She decides on chocolate chip, triumphantly turning to us with proper reassurance that the world wants her to have ice cream. “I thought that if I stayed near the room today, I wouldn't be able to find any. Apparently, the world found me instead.” “There goes the world....”, down the street and off into the distance, an unbearably long ways away by the time she finishes and starts to crave another.
Then we work on catching up with more footage, and figuring out how to manage our somewhat non-functioning camera. This leads us on a wild goose chase through town to find a repair shop and a clothing outlet to purchase non-hole jeans. Everyone we stopped at for video repairs pointed the finger in a new direction so we ended up with a new pair of pants and no más. One of us stayed to do a big batch of laundry, scrubbing until their hands hurt.
Afterwards, we assume Sisyphus' position and push the rock up the hill once more, sorting our footage and diving face first into our laptops. We all nod off as the flash drives blink, still attached to the computer as it plays video.
Tuesday, 7 July
“There’s this adorable little cockroach in the bathroom.”
“Oh! What a quaint little river of trash.”
So today we search for the new motherhostal. This one promised us hot, hot water (it’s tepid at best) that enticed us into buying into their schemes. The price is too high. The room is too cold. The place is just not right. Entonces, we wake up temprano to ride about in the city streets, stopping at any hostel that seems like it might be Mister Right. But like real life, it just doesn’t exist. So in our fit of frustration, Adam jerks sharply and into the market on bike, bumping into old ladies trying to carry large amounts of vegetables. Upon exiting, we stumble onto a very nice street with lovely two or three story homes. The grass is trimmed just right and there are people selling bread up the street. Anomaly.
And then it catches our eye, “Se Alquila Cuarto.” Maybe it was chance. Maybe it was luck. Maybe some force within us brought us to this beautiful single room located directly aside the market and many ladies selling bread. Maybe just maybe it was all by accident. Whatever it was, we end up in a room with a floor and a boxspring for 35/week. The cheapest that we’ve encountered. Que bueno.
So we head back to make sure that we get out of the room by 11am. We’ve learned our lesson the hard way from the awful…ly sneaky old lady from San Andres. Fleeing the scene, we slide and skid our turns back to the prim and properly landscaped neighborhood to claim our newly discovered treasure. From here, we make a few calls to start setting up the normal round of interviews. GTZ. Casa de la Salud. Cruz Roja Española y Peruana. La Federacion Internacional de Cruz Roja. Cáritas. CODEHICA. JICA. Some new players. Some old players. A good sampling of the usual with some spice to snap us out of our routine.
Meanwhile back on the farm, we upload pictures to this blog and send out a terribly nice email to request an interview with PNUD Ica. There is noticeable difference between the ways that PNUD works in different cities. Whether it is due to the urban setting, the director’s preferences, or the poshness of the office is a question I wouldn’t be able to answer. Largely what we have discovered from our interviews is that the quality of the information as well as the understanding of our project is dependent on the personality of the interviewed. Not surprising, but it makes our job that much more difficult.
From here, we think we’re going to Chincha. But then we’re not. But then again, where is this place we have an interview at in an hour? Apparently, far away. So we take off like the wind. Or should I say like galloping stallions with whipping manes as we weave through the streets and between cars. Sometimes I imagine that we’re really in a Western movie rather than the Southern hemisphere as we ride into sunsets and off into the distance to some undetermined location. But, we sort of already know where we’re going. Casa de la Salud, a Peruvian development NGO.
He’s not there when we arrive 40 minutes early. He’s not there when we ask again an hour later. But Lindsey is here with a bag of churros, oranges, 2 ice creams, and 14 pieces of bread. He does arrive about 30 minutes after we’re supposed to have meet. But he is very busy so we defer to another day and another person because we’ve learned that harried interviewees give cut and dry answers. But he asks if we want to go along with a team to Guadalupe to hand out invitations to community leaders there. They are hosting an event there on Saturday to try and capture the community’s needs through a somewhat participative workshop to assess where the city’s priorities lie.
We take a cab there. The man driving has a head that is shaped like a cab. As in his head looks like a car. All square and … stuff. Our flip cams capture a donkey crossing the road and the sights flashing before our eyes as the cab lurches towards the outskirts of Ica. On the first day there was light, and on this day, there was Janet.
Janet is jokingly called “gringa” because of her fair skin. Nicknames like this are definitely not uncommon here, seeing as most of the people that we meet along the way go by names like “Chumby,” “El Gato,” and “Chupily.” Casa de la Salud (which shall now go by Casa) has been in contact with Janet for several other projects. She’s lived here for 8 years, long enough to see fluctuations in population. Notably, the flood of people from the mountains who came here to have more access to urban resources after the earthquake. She has also been here long enough to be familiar with the waning and waxing NGO presence. She seems somewhat tentative. Casa’s upcoming Saturday meeting seems a lot like some of the meetings that other NGOs have hosted in the past, and she warns the team that a lot of people will associate their event with something long gone and unfinished. Nonetheless, she is still happy and willing to take us along to meet all the leaders in the community. She is incredibly articulate and gives us some juicy footage. She doesn’t like liars and apparently there are some organizations that have come and gone that would fall in that category. We meet the “president” of the community who tells us a little bit about the politics, aid, and land titles in the area. He has a strong opinion about land titles and realized early on that people would need proper entitlement before receiving aid. So he fought and fought. He is proud to announce that in the past few months, things have worked out and the titles are being approved. This is essentially a case of invasion by displaced people onto government land during emergency, setting up permanent infrastructure, and eventually gaining property rights to the land. Property rights are a huge deal nowadays, an interesting side effect of the earthquake.
We like her so much we plan on coming back in two days.
Then we return home to grab our bikes and shoot like arrows oh-so-true to our beloved hogar.
Monday, 6 July
“I think Adam and Brooke need to work on their communication skills, especially considering the nature of their research. You know, it being about communication and all.”
Sunday night after our weekend-long adventure en bicicletas, Adam is the only soul both brave and un-dead (meaning awake and chock-full of energy, not living-dead zombie kind of un-dead) enough to shower and wash off approximately a week’s worth of grime. For the lady folk, this task is put off til Monday morning. Lindsey removes her cornrows before washing up, returning her hair to its usual state, and Brooke actually brings some clothes into the shower with her, pioneering a whole new method of laundry-doing.
Then we had our first project-related meeting in ICA, with PNUD, to figure out which NGOs are working in the area, what they’re doing, and how we can track them down for some serious entravista-grabar-ing. Our new amigo, Hernan hooks us up with quite a bit of info, but we also can tell right away that the Ica PNUD office is much less active in its current state than the Pisco office. Interesting.
After this, we had some time to kill before our interview date with the Arquitectos de la Emergencia, so we decided to explore our new ciudad and hit up a local mall. A mall you say? Yes a mall! (Damn a mall). It feels like being in almost a different country than when we were in Pisco. There, Lindsey finds some seriously over-priced helado, but which is also seriously tasty (chocolate cake, white chocolate, and some fancy name which means mint), and blows all her money (or approximately 5.50 soles of her own plus 2 soles which she begs off of Adam) on this delightful treat.
From here we headed off to make some phone calls and update the blog – yes, update you. We end up spending quite awhile as the many internet spots are very busy at this time. We finish just in time (ok, a little late but the main half of the interview was even more late, so it was kinda like we were not late) to head over to the rented home of the oh-so-well-known Architects in Emergencies. Translate that into French and pronounce it and that is their real name.
Here we had one of our more informal interviews as this group is all young architects, engineers, and business students taking time away from school and rejecting offers from well-paying internships to essentially work as volunteer interns receiving a small stipend. They were interesting to talk to and ended in everyone heading down to the local hamburger stand to grab hot chocalate with cinnamon, hamburgers, and chicken burgers. The prices here were nearly American equivalents, though, so our budget took more of a hit than any of us would have liked. In fact, on our way home we found multiple places where we could have eaten the same sandwiches for half the price, which was even then still expensive-ish = $10 for 3 of us.
Tired and exhilarated we crashed upon arrival at home.
I have to say, the part starting with "In these small experiences, I feel as though I am making acquaintances with stories that I'll never know," and the bit that follows, is really a beautiful piece of writing. If that's Talsma, I'm definitely impressed - actually I'm impressed either way.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you guys are having an amazing time. Thanks for keeping me amused while I'm procrastinating at work.
-Bonnie