Oopsie Daisies

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

egads. here's the latest:

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

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

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

Quotes from the lunch experience.

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

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

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

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

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



6 August 2009, Thursday

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

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

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

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

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

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

We´ll take it.

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

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

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

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

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

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


5 August 2009, Wednesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


4 August 2009, Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


3 August 2009, Monday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Flash Recovery

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

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

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

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!

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.