Oops there goes gravity

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.