I think we want a hard shell

Friday, 10 July
“If there were two of us three who were going to suck on a dog’s teet, it’d be you two.”
“If you took her out of the sleeping bag but left the three pigs, could you have pigs in a blanket?” “No, because she is like aji, it adds that certain necessary something that I just don’t like.”

One alarm
Two alarms
Three alarms, no more
Two people on a mattress while
One is on the floor

Today, the girls rise with the sun
And the boy remains until shopping’s done
We return with sweets and fruit
While Adam sleeps like a brute
The crumbs burst and scatter
As we eat with a clatter
Finishing our loot

Some of us try to shower
If we have the power
To muster up might
To win the fight
Against a temperature we find sour

The camera broke
Who knew it would croak
But the repair was quick and spicy

Now we’ll take care
For who wouldn’t dare
To treat it oh so nice-y

Although rhyming is fun
This entry would never be done
If we kept going
It’d be quite slowing
To write a poem like this one

In the morning, it never fails that one of us is still asleep while the other two go out to get breakfast. We have very carefully developed a game called guess-the-price-of-that-food for when everyone gathers round to eat. Yesterday morning, Lindsey was off by 1 sole or so. This morning, Adam was off by 0 centimos. Every day, we get better at approximating what food should cost in the market that is conveniently located a stone’s throw away from our apartment. Which is helpful since we are becoming better at market prices and determining when we are being ripped off for being gringos.

Afterwards, we head out to the Plaza and leave Lauren behind to a luxurious shower of cold water. My favorite part of the morning is leaving on bike to dive into the streets of Ica. Cars here keep enough space from the sides of the roads to allow for some gnarly traffic weaving. Bumps in the road are exhilarating at full speed. The cranks of our bikes are eating our hard work, and you can hear the chains straining under the weight of our feet now. It seems as though they are overdue for an oil change. In addition, taxi drivers here have the fastest reflexes of any one that I have ever witnessed. What Americans might consider a game of chicken is normal practice here. Let’s just call it fun.

Since our camera broke down, we got to file our first insurance claim ever. It is probably some of the easiest paper work I’ve done for business purposes. Unfortunately, the situation is one of the most complicated I’ve had to describe to a touch tone phone menu. Press 1 for the sales department. Press 6 for the insurance department. Press 0 if we have not yet described the nature of your call to speak with a representative. This call may be monitored for quality insurance purposes. Please hold.

So we held. And they advised us to get the camera fixed here in Peru. So we did. Yesterday, I was prepared to be without a camera until August. Today, they inform us that the camera was simply malfunctioning normally. How delightful to live in a world where products are designed to have short lifespans and “typical malfunctions.” In the meantime, we made more copies of our NGO interviewing worksheet since we have been blowing through them at record rates. Thankfully, we’ve managed to standardize our interviews into a sheet so we can arrange all responses into a large matrix for comparison purposes. We have also been able to start to develop NGO profiles complete with event records, community surveys, and interviews that pertain to each organization.

While riding one handed and using the other to pat ourselves on the back, we roll into to the Plaza de Armas like gangsters looking for trouble. So much trouble, we decide to just ride up on the sidewalk, next to the fountains, in front of the guy mopping the concrete, and right past the police who stare at us incredulously. Then the mob comes complete with pitchforks and fire in their eyes. This is a clean city. A city where bikes stay on the streets. This is a pristine city. A city where there are people in suits. While we desperately try to explain that we just want to be close to our bikes while making business phone calls, another policeman walks up. She is more pristine than the city. In fact, her shoes sparkle and you can smell the starch in the sharp creases of her uniform. She is the tourist police. Just like in Guatemala. Thank you ma’am.

So we make phone calls in the Plaza de Armas. Smugly.

We make up a list of five or six addresses to visit today. We’ll just play it all by ear starting with … CODEHICA, Comisión de Derechos Humanos de Ica. Note to self, that’s the Commission for Human Rights in the region of Ica. Pronounced así: Co-Day-Ee-kah.

A note on asking for directions in Peru. You get two types of people. One type knows and will give you overly detailed directions. These people, we say yes thank you very much we’ll get there no don’t worry thank you. All those words are spoken as we are in motion away from them as they explain for the third time with different landmarks. The other type are those who think they know where our destination is. They say, thatta way a little and then like turn this way and maybe twirl once or twice for good luck. These are the kinds of people that we run into most. For future reference, CODEHICA is over there a bit, which is where we finally found ourselves.

Padre José Manuel has the eyes of a man who really cares, says Adam. He has the schedule of a man who can spare an hour of talking to random university students who walk in unexpectedly. We’ve seen CODEHICA in many different places that we’ve worked already. They usually come as a single volunteer that has a presence during participatory budgets to ensure that it is run fairly or during elections to act as a guarantee of its democracy. We’ve seen them at least three times in the past. Probably more since they are like silent guardian angels that look after the people of Peru.

CODEHICA was founded in 1982 by a group of people that included the man we were interviewing. He seemed proud of this fact, but not overly so, His answered were saturated in experience, and the organization offered us a window into new ways of communication that we have yet to encounter. CODEHICA runs a radio and television station which broadcasts the opinions and ideas of the community here. We will be finding out more next week. In addition, they have talleres on topics like “using the Internet” or ¨Equal employment for the handicapped.” In some sense, their topics seem much more advanced than what we’ve been encountering. It is far beyond wash-your-hands – here have some soap and a towel. The programs that they offer, however, covers a wide variety of topics. They build houses of the temporary and permanent source, protect life against dictatorships, work against armed violence, protecting democracy, increasing political transparency, and developing local government capacity.

After we set up more appointments to do site visits as well as tape a radio show, we stand on the second floor to stare at the view. I’d like to call it a moment of reflection. During this internalization of information, we spy with our little eyes a church called Iglesia Lurin. One side of it is tall and stands like a proud soldier. The other has a crumpled tower and an ashamed slanted face. We eat mandarins next to it. We take pictures like tourists. We make phone calls to more NGOs who tell us to call back in ten minutes. So we eat mandarins and take more pictures. In these small experiences, I feel as though I am making acquaintances with stories that I’ll never know. It reminds me somewhat of people, things, and places that you can’t entirely understand without time and distance. Or maybe time and endurance. From afar, this building is lined with iron fencing. But something squeezes between those bars and radiates past. There are things you can’t really know without putting them under a microscope. There are other things that you can’t really know unless you are able to see it in context. With the church framed in the lens of the camera, we saw it poise itself to tell stories of the people it had supported through the earthquake, the aid that it provided to the affected community, and the symbol of remembrance it offered.

Then we call Aportes who says, we’re busy right now and we’re headed to a site visit but you can come if you want, but we’re going soon. Y entonces, fuimos a APORTES para ver su trabajo de campo. Even though they are busy and getting ready to leave, they manage to offer us a glass of coca-cola, provide us with a fifteen minute documentary of their NGO, and let us use their bathroom. This is a good sign of the work we are about to see.

APORTES is primarily working in La Nueva Esparanza (The New Hope). Here, they are constructing houses from CMU blocks. FYI, for your information, CMU stands for concrete masonry units. Why do you care? I don’t know. In short, this was one of the coolest site visits that we’ve ever gone on por culpa de la pequeña fiesta. Lined with houses in various stages of completion, the entire street was hard at work. APORTES has a system where they employ certain people in the beneficiary families to build homes. This auto-construction technique seems to work very well since the houses end up being completed in twenty days or something por allí.

As with a cake, the very finishing touch is the tip-top. Nice to meet you Traditional Peru. When the roof is put on top of the house, there is alarge celebration. The owner ties a bottle of wine and flowers to his front door. A mototaxi with the dueño’s wife and a large pot of food arrives. Everyone gathers for a speech by Aportes who offers blessings of security, fidelity, and good luck. Then the neighborhood ceases to make construction noises as people put down screwdrivers, power tools, and their shovels. Ingrid holds a hammer up in her hand, and swings while squeezing her eyes closed tightly. And it … doesn’t break. So some guy has to come over to help her shatter glass and alcohol all over his newly constructed home. Then everyone rushes in to sit, pass around beer, and be fed delicious food in celebration. Que bueno.

We also check out the Casa de Sonrisas, a community center built and initially run by APORTES, which is largely a psicosocial NGO. This space is dedicated to afterschool programs for children as well as mothers and fathers workshops. We asked the lady getting ready to run the womens´meeting what kinds of things they discussed. ¨Sexual Assertiveness¨, and ¨Menstrual hygience¨. OK, says Adam. Alright, says Brooke. Goodbye says Lorena.

Since its beginning, the community members have been handed over control of the meetings that are run. They now have an executive committee for operations but are still dependent on materials (understandably) from APORTES. In December, if they pass, they will be handed over full control and all the materials. From talking to the ladies it seems that they certainly find the information from the workshops useful and also enjoy hearing and sharing input with other members of their neighborhood.

We head back home around sunset and get to know Ingrid better. She is an energetic member of the APORTES team and Brooke gets Spanish practice setting up an interview with her and discussing everything from star signs to restaurants to dune buggies. Al llegar at the NGO base, we bike back towards our place, stopping only to treat ourselves to some pie de manzana.

During the course of the day, Lorena had managed to acquire an array of intriguing videos including a plethora of Michael Jackson music videos and Angelina Jolie movies. We eat some fruit and get some tea. The tea had alfalfa in it. It was too sweet though. Poor alfalfa. From there we settle down to upload all the film and organize our data from the day. We are quickly running out of hard drive space, and we don’t know where to find soft drives. Lorena remembered seeing a place in Chincha where they sell semi-squishy drives so we may have to go back there.

And then there were 4 pages. And they saw that it was good. ish. At least the poem was good, you have to give Brooke that.


Thursday, 9 July
¨Do you think there is some sort of dog hierarchy around here, and the ones with the sweaters tell the others what to do?¨

Ica is known for its large sand dunes. The city is built around an oasis called Huacachina, which is in the middle of the coastal desert region of Peru. Tourists come by to drive dune buggies and wear sunglasses. We´re not staying near the tourists, but we happen to have a dune a couple blocks down from us, that is surrounded by homes facing the opposite direction. So lonely it looked (says Yoda) that we decided to take a detour from our morning jog to scale it like a fish.

Have you ever tried spitting on a dune. Highly recommended. Also recommended is creating lahar slides. Oh and you should also watch the Grant Hill NBA Sensation film because it is transformative.

On the way back we stopped at the market Arenales – which we now know the name of thanks to our new friend, Yanet Hernández, from the settlement outside of Guadalupe. We played a game called ´we only have 5 soles for breakfast´ and ended up with a decent array of 8 small bananas, 3 apples, an avocado (it was the most expensive, least ripe, and least touched purchase), a chunk of queso, 16 little breads, spinach, and spicy sauce.

After the breakfast we headed over to run some errands including shopping for oh-so-needed batteries, water, animal crackers, helado, internet, hard drive and insurance calls. From there we spent approximately 2 hours in a brainstorming session. Into the session we brought only our original project proposal, some blank pages, pens and 3 sparkling minds. The event location was determined by a small sign outside a restaurant that read ¨Menú, ají de gallina.¨ Ají de gallina means ¨Tasty, enter here.¨ So we did.

Over a meal of deliciousness and a bottella of Cristal we discussed what each others thoughts were on our progress, and what we should focus on moving forward. We concluded that we were performing a decent job interviewing NGO coordinators which was providing us with a nice smattering of the reconstruction work being done in the various regions most affected by the earthquake. We do not however feel that our community surveys are effective enough in capturing quality opinions from the places where NGOs are working. We decide to focus a bit more on interviewing community leaders both informal and formal alike. This seems to be a good idea since they are often the ones who have more keen personalities and have also interacted much more with NGOs and coordination amongst the community in general.

We also discuss more about how to use the rest of our time here. We agree that we want to develop a new method for helping improve some component of the communication between NGOs and the beneficiary communities. How best to do this is the $2 question. We conclude that we would like to either focus on how beneficiaries for homes are chosen or how evaluation of projects is conducted. To do this we are thinking of partnering with some institution not personally involved in working in the area to do a workshop with community leaders and youth with the goal of learning one specific neighborhoods experience with NGO communication in this particular component. The details will be mulled over the following week or so and will be carried out over the course of August.

With thunderstormed brains we head over to one of our few interviews with community leaders. We are excited to see how it works out. The interviewee is named Yanet Hernández and she meets us at the tienda near her home. Here we conduct the interview and she gives expectedly better information than we have been receiving by our random surveys we have been conducting up till now. She mentions that the housing project in her town involved no community members in the selection of the beneficiaries and that she would be interested in seeing NGOs evaluate projects after they are finished. Granted they have had mostly short-term aid in the form of donations.

From the interview we head over to the local Vaso de Leche, a government subsidized program for providing families with daily quantaties of milky, steaming quaker proportional to the number of children in the home. Yanet fills her small pot and heads home. That is when Lorena met them. Smiling and energetic, dark-haired and respectful, inquisitive and playful. Lucero, Kiara, Oscar, and Rosa – Yanet´s gorgeous children. Lorena spends the rest of the visit playing with the children and trading pictures of them for kisses. Oh, the language that is transaction.

Dinner is the standard sautéed noodles and chicken soup, but the treat is Michael Jackson videos streaming on the TV in the background. Smooth Criminal, Thriller, and Scream provide us with enough entertainment and amazement that even after getting back to the room, Brooke cannot get Mike outta her head.

Then we do something really new and exciting – we upload footage and go over old footage to standardize the NGO event notes a bit more.

Wednesday, 8 July
“When I hear the glorious music, I'll know that my ice cream lady is nigh.”
“Why are these gringos in my calle?”
“Brooke, are your parents named River and Stream?”

The market is closed this morning. Adam has to cycle thrice the expected distance to find hot quaker – too hot apparently because the womenfolk take too long drinking it and force us to rush to make our 9am meeting with GTZ. GTZ stands for something in German that is equivalent of cooperation between German government and developing nations. They have a special arrangement with Peru especially to do water projects nationwide.

GTZ is not an NGO, it is an institution funded strictly by government ministries within Germany and also the EU. It may be the German equivalent of USAID but more focused on permanent development relationships with developing nations. I can't think of the actual equivalent US branch, if you think of it, comment it in so Lindsey doesn't have to look it up

GTZ is in a ritzy neighborhood, everyone is nicely dressed and relaxed, friendly and inviting, and the showerhead of the bathroom has muliple settings. We are wearing some clothes that used to be white, and Brooke feels self-conscious about the holes in her jeans. The interview we showed up for was with an Architect Project Manager named Lucia Ramos Cuba. It goes well. It is one of the more formal interviews yet, and it is clear that this organization has been working many years doing development in the region with well-educated leaders. We can't help but wonder what they are like in the field. The field is not well-educated. Does that mean that when the tall Germans walk in they feel more intimidated? Do the office workers send field workers to the field?

After the interview, we attempt to set up a time for a site visit to one of their projects. We may be going next week, was the response we received from the engineer who worked under the Project Coordinator Piet Van Driel. Maybe we are right, and they aren't the ones going into the field as much.

After a tour of the office we head home. Brooke says, “Let's take this road.” So we do. Everything is closed. Noon. Siesta? Up ahead we see burning black mounds and smoke with large stones all scatttered across the road. A group of approximately 20 guys dressed in jeans and t-shirts are loudly running around like a non-domesticated school of fish. As we near the intersection, rocks are thrown. Crash. They hit the frame of a mototaxi trying to get around the burning debris. The school of fish goes after it with verbal curses and presumably force the mototaxi driver into paying to be released, under strict orders to not make any money today.

It dawns on us: today is the national strike by the transportation industry in response to overly-hefty fines being leveled against motorists. This was why the market was closed as well. As we slow down a safe distance away but still in eyeshot of the frantic scene, we film from afar, listening to the sounds of sirens thick in the air. There were very few motorists on the road, mostly individuals on motorcycles with families or taxis that turned around on the dime as soon as they neared the scrambled omelet made up of smouldering tires, gleeful strikers, and curious bystanders. The sirens approached more quickly and three motorbikes invaded the scene, followed by a black pick -up truck spilling over with policia in the back. You would expect them to be synchronized swimmers as they hop out one right after the other and into the streets. Big black boots kick through the air, shooing the strikers like you might shoo a dog who is trying to eat dinner scraps from the table.

The entire thing doesn't take all that long. By the time the police are done pushing burning trash out of the way, incoming traffic is flowing smoothly through the intersection. Like butter on a communication sandwich. So we turn to go home through empty streets that are littered with bricks, some patches of broken glass, and small bags of trash. Of course, Brooke gets a flat tire which forces us to walk past the people playing cards, cooking outside, and hanging out in the streets. This town would be decidedly much nicer to be in if there was a strike everyday. That way people could lounge about in the streets all day, talking about strikes and political topics. On our way back, we encounter a group at an intersection receive a box of bananas which is promptly invaded. Every one pumps their fists and bananas in the air, toasting the success of keeping cars from passing. But not us, oh no. We walk right on by and to our street.

Hey street. Hey guys. What did you do today? Saw a strike. Yeah? Yeah. Cool.

Brooke sets off to fix her first flat of the trip. Hopefully we can avoid any more. Adam heads back into town to find some lunch. Lindsey (who has confessed she was once named “the slug” her freshman year of college) reclines in bed reading a structures book. Then we all sit in the sun and eat from improvised dishes made up of bottom bottoms for bowls, bottle tops as funnels for soup, and plastic/banana plate for our chicken and rice. The sun feels good. As we start to slow down, music floats from around the corner. A recognizable melody that perks Lindsey's nose from normal to flaring nostrils. Complete with a smile from ear to ear. The ice cream lady pedals around in her dashing yellow uniform, dutifully stopping for an eager costumer. I can see the gears turning in Lindsey's head... chocolate chip or chocolate chip? She decides on chocolate chip, triumphantly turning to us with proper reassurance that the world wants her to have ice cream. “I thought that if I stayed near the room today, I wouldn't be able to find any. Apparently, the world found me instead.” “There goes the world....”, down the street and off into the distance, an unbearably long ways away by the time she finishes and starts to crave another.

Then we work on catching up with more footage, and figuring out how to manage our somewhat non-functioning camera. This leads us on a wild goose chase through town to find a repair shop and a clothing outlet to purchase non-hole jeans. Everyone we stopped at for video repairs pointed the finger in a new direction so we ended up with a new pair of pants and no más. One of us stayed to do a big batch of laundry, scrubbing until their hands hurt.

Afterwards, we assume Sisyphus' position and push the rock up the hill once more, sorting our footage and diving face first into our laptops. We all nod off as the flash drives blink, still attached to the computer as it plays video.

Tuesday, 7 July
“There’s this adorable little cockroach in the bathroom.”
“Oh! What a quaint little river of trash.”

So today we search for the new motherhostal. This one promised us hot, hot water (it’s tepid at best) that enticed us into buying into their schemes. The price is too high. The room is too cold. The place is just not right. Entonces, we wake up temprano to ride about in the city streets, stopping at any hostel that seems like it might be Mister Right. But like real life, it just doesn’t exist. So in our fit of frustration, Adam jerks sharply and into the market on bike, bumping into old ladies trying to carry large amounts of vegetables. Upon exiting, we stumble onto a very nice street with lovely two or three story homes. The grass is trimmed just right and there are people selling bread up the street. Anomaly.

And then it catches our eye, “Se Alquila Cuarto.” Maybe it was chance. Maybe it was luck. Maybe some force within us brought us to this beautiful single room located directly aside the market and many ladies selling bread. Maybe just maybe it was all by accident. Whatever it was, we end up in a room with a floor and a boxspring for 35/week. The cheapest that we’ve encountered. Que bueno.

So we head back to make sure that we get out of the room by 11am. We’ve learned our lesson the hard way from the awful…ly sneaky old lady from San Andres. Fleeing the scene, we slide and skid our turns back to the prim and properly landscaped neighborhood to claim our newly discovered treasure. From here, we make a few calls to start setting up the normal round of interviews. GTZ. Casa de la Salud. Cruz Roja Española y Peruana. La Federacion Internacional de Cruz Roja. Cáritas. CODEHICA. JICA. Some new players. Some old players. A good sampling of the usual with some spice to snap us out of our routine.

Meanwhile back on the farm, we upload pictures to this blog and send out a terribly nice email to request an interview with PNUD Ica. There is noticeable difference between the ways that PNUD works in different cities. Whether it is due to the urban setting, the director’s preferences, or the poshness of the office is a question I wouldn’t be able to answer. Largely what we have discovered from our interviews is that the quality of the information as well as the understanding of our project is dependent on the personality of the interviewed. Not surprising, but it makes our job that much more difficult.

From here, we think we’re going to Chincha. But then we’re not. But then again, where is this place we have an interview at in an hour? Apparently, far away. So we take off like the wind. Or should I say like galloping stallions with whipping manes as we weave through the streets and between cars. Sometimes I imagine that we’re really in a Western movie rather than the Southern hemisphere as we ride into sunsets and off into the distance to some undetermined location. But, we sort of already know where we’re going. Casa de la Salud, a Peruvian development NGO.

He’s not there when we arrive 40 minutes early. He’s not there when we ask again an hour later. But Lindsey is here with a bag of churros, oranges, 2 ice creams, and 14 pieces of bread. He does arrive about 30 minutes after we’re supposed to have meet. But he is very busy so we defer to another day and another person because we’ve learned that harried interviewees give cut and dry answers. But he asks if we want to go along with a team to Guadalupe to hand out invitations to community leaders there. They are hosting an event there on Saturday to try and capture the community’s needs through a somewhat participative workshop to assess where the city’s priorities lie.

We take a cab there. The man driving has a head that is shaped like a cab. As in his head looks like a car. All square and … stuff. Our flip cams capture a donkey crossing the road and the sights flashing before our eyes as the cab lurches towards the outskirts of Ica. On the first day there was light, and on this day, there was Janet.

Janet is jokingly called “gringa” because of her fair skin. Nicknames like this are definitely not uncommon here, seeing as most of the people that we meet along the way go by names like “Chumby,” “El Gato,” and “Chupily.” Casa de la Salud (which shall now go by Casa) has been in contact with Janet for several other projects. She’s lived here for 8 years, long enough to see fluctuations in population. Notably, the flood of people from the mountains who came here to have more access to urban resources after the earthquake. She has also been here long enough to be familiar with the waning and waxing NGO presence. She seems somewhat tentative. Casa’s upcoming Saturday meeting seems a lot like some of the meetings that other NGOs have hosted in the past, and she warns the team that a lot of people will associate their event with something long gone and unfinished. Nonetheless, she is still happy and willing to take us along to meet all the leaders in the community. She is incredibly articulate and gives us some juicy footage. She doesn’t like liars and apparently there are some organizations that have come and gone that would fall in that category. We meet the “president” of the community who tells us a little bit about the politics, aid, and land titles in the area. He has a strong opinion about land titles and realized early on that people would need proper entitlement before receiving aid. So he fought and fought. He is proud to announce that in the past few months, things have worked out and the titles are being approved. This is essentially a case of invasion by displaced people onto government land during emergency, setting up permanent infrastructure, and eventually gaining property rights to the land. Property rights are a huge deal nowadays, an interesting side effect of the earthquake.

We like her so much we plan on coming back in two days.

Then we return home to grab our bikes and shoot like arrows oh-so-true to our beloved hogar.

Monday, 6 July
“I think Adam and Brooke need to work on their communication skills, especially considering the nature of their research. You know, it being about communication and all.”

Sunday night after our weekend-long adventure en bicicletas, Adam is the only soul both brave and un-dead (meaning awake and chock-full of energy, not living-dead zombie kind of un-dead) enough to shower and wash off approximately a week’s worth of grime. For the lady folk, this task is put off til Monday morning. Lindsey removes her cornrows before washing up, returning her hair to its usual state, and Brooke actually brings some clothes into the shower with her, pioneering a whole new method of laundry-doing.

Then we had our first project-related meeting in ICA, with PNUD, to figure out which NGOs are working in the area, what they’re doing, and how we can track them down for some serious entravista-grabar-ing. Our new amigo, Hernan hooks us up with quite a bit of info, but we also can tell right away that the Ica PNUD office is much less active in its current state than the Pisco office. Interesting.

After this, we had some time to kill before our interview date with the Arquitectos de la Emergencia, so we decided to explore our new ciudad and hit up a local mall. A mall you say? Yes a mall! (Damn a mall). It feels like being in almost a different country than when we were in Pisco. There, Lindsey finds some seriously over-priced helado, but which is also seriously tasty (chocolate cake, white chocolate, and some fancy name which means mint), and blows all her money (or approximately 5.50 soles of her own plus 2 soles which she begs off of Adam) on this delightful treat.

From here we headed off to make some phone calls and update the blog – yes, update you. We end up spending quite awhile as the many internet spots are very busy at this time. We finish just in time (ok, a little late but the main half of the interview was even more late, so it was kinda like we were not late) to head over to the rented home of the oh-so-well-known Architects in Emergencies. Translate that into French and pronounce it and that is their real name.

Here we had one of our more informal interviews as this group is all young architects, engineers, and business students taking time away from school and rejecting offers from well-paying internships to essentially work as volunteer interns receiving a small stipend. They were interesting to talk to and ended in everyone heading down to the local hamburger stand to grab hot chocalate with cinnamon, hamburgers, and chicken burgers. The prices here were nearly American equivalents, though, so our budget took more of a hit than any of us would have liked. In fact, on our way home we found multiple places where we could have eaten the same sandwiches for half the price, which was even then still expensive-ish = $10 for 3 of us.

Tired and exhilarated we crashed upon arrival at home.

The Flood

Sunday, July 5 The 60 mile bike ride to Ica
¨I want to sleep, eat, pee, and get off my bike all at the same time.¨
¨This is like the first day of lacrosse practice - just it never ends.¨

Wake up at 6. Eat some brekkie. Start packing up, but it takes forever and lindsey is good at being like omg i'm going to the bathroom and disappearing for an hour. Look at a view at La Mina in the reserve. Oh that was nice. It was 7 km in the wrong direction. Then a really really big hill, not so big as the one adam rolls down to check out the view from down below, but there's nothing so he has to come back up. Ride to El Chaco, a town just north of Paracas, get lunch and an interview. Still going the wrong direction, but we need to meet up with the intersection for the Panamericana, the only route from Pisco to Ica. After the break, we head east. We stop about 11 km away to buy piña yogurt and oranges for the long ride, adjust our bikes which are already hurting, switch packs to evenly hurt all parts of our backs. About 2o km in we hit up a brotherhood of 8 or 9 (or 50 depending on who you ask) hills one after another. Lindsey says she'll remember one in particular for whatever is left of her life. The next rest stop consists of Inca Kola on the side of the road. After those hills the rest of the ride is gradually uphill for another 4 hours of biking. A total of 6 hours biking, but it was a full day starting from 9am and ending with our triumphant arrival at the center of the central square of Ica at 6pm. (Immediately upon our arrival we realized Ica was different than Pisco or Chincha, especially when the policemen told us to not ride on the pretty tiles surrounding the concrete structure in the middle of the square.)

As for lodging, everything is much more expensive than other places, as we had been warned. After a bit of searching, we find a place for about 7/10ths of our two week stay in Pisco for just two nights = 70 soles. While Lindsey chills out, we grab 3 hamburgers, a muffin, water, and a portion of fries. She warms up on them, then we go out for dinner. We buy 13 bananas, 2.5 liters of water, 3 small egg/spinach sandwiches, 2 bowls of soup, a portion of meat and rice, a portion of noodles veggies and meats, and three bags of emolient tea (which, is made with “cat nail” by the way..). Celebrating our arrival! Next time you see Lindsey, give her a pat on the back since this was by far the farthest she´s ever biked, and ended up finishing strong all the way through, far exceeding Adam´s expectations. Josie are you reading this?

After returning we attempt to work to update our budget, but keep falling asleepppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz


Saturday, July 4 Happy Fourth of July
¨Quiero un helado bien helado y azucar con galletitas de animal al lado.¨

It´s kind of become a morning routine that the ladies lie around in bed snoozin´ while the resident hombre heads out to hunt and gather food. Today he brings back some natural flavored yogurt from the plaza and more fruits to add to our collection from yesterday. However, when he pours the yogurt into a bowl of fruit, he notices more chunks than seems right. After a little test sip, our suspicions are confirmed. Nast-tastic. He heads back to the plaza to argue our case for a replacement yogurt and after many taste testers at the store claim that ¨maybe that´s how natural yogurt is supposed to taste¨, he finally helps them realize that no they would not want to drink that crap. He is allowed to bring home another yogurt, but not the same flavor, because the store people think that
a. maybe Adam (and they themselves) don´t fully understand what natural yogurt should taste like
b. maybe the whole batch of that kind is bad

So after Adam goes back and forth between our little home and the plaza a billion times, we are still not done with the packing that we began quite a while ago. We finish up and eat lots and lots of non-gross lucuma yogurt and many fruits before heading out to San Andres where we hit up our fav smoothie lady one last time or a mixture of papaya, naranja, and some of our old lechuga and fugly bananas. Lorena will greatly miss her and her delicious, non-watered down mixtures of love and nutrition but was too embarrassed to try and express that sentiment in Spanish.

Then comes the first leg of our two-day biking extravaganza. We arrive in Paracas in time for dinner and after Lorena heads into town to say hey to the tourism lady and use her cushy bathroom, she also grabs an emergency ice cream sandwich. She returns to find Brooke carving a puppy (which looks strangely like a beaver) out of a carrot stick while feeding the non-puppy scraps to a happy little conejo at her side named Adam. She proves the goodness of the knife-sharpening job that that knife sharpening man in Pisco did by cutting herself in the finger with the sharp knife. When Brooke finishes her creation (which looks more like a kangaroo after we bite off the front legs), we go into town for some carrots, corn, pimiento, queso, galletas, and manzanas for our dinner later that night. At the store, we meet Obama, the owner’s black cat, and Lorena falls in love with a tiny gatito who lets her pet him while the grownups shop for food.

We hurry along to the national park cuz it’s getting kind of dark and after too many too many too many hills we arrive at the puesto de control de Lagunilla and set up our tent in lots of wind near a little cliff above the ocean. The man at the control post tells us we might get sprayed with ocean water during the night but we decide to take our chances and hang out there. We eat our cheese and crackers and fruits and raw corn (Brooke claims that this is in fact a thing you can do) and feel kind of French despite Adam’s realization that it’s the Fourth of July!

After telling some stories while huddling together in our little tent, we drift off into un-sleep to the soothing sounds of the thunderous waves and intense wind, wondering what the view will look like in the morning.


Friday 03 July Fridays are busy
¨I watched Michael Jackson...and a fortune telling monkey...and suprise helado with chocolate on top.¨

This morning we were rudely awaken by a man who stormed the room with fresh fruit and a big smile, all talking 'bout how his bike had broken and how he had brought us breakfast in bed. Stupid Adam. Then he also told us that we should be ready to leave the room in five minutes flat, straight from horizontal. Because that was feasible. So we took an hour and five minutes to get to the market and take a 40 minute collectivo to San Clemente. So in the thick of our rush, Cristian called us all like, be here in 10 minutes. And we were like, yeah, not possible. Cristian was a surprising new addition to our day, but welcomed.

So we half walked, half took a collectivo towards San Clemente where Cristian waited patiently for us. We split up to cover more ground for the day. Chincha with Cristian to see the documentary/research that he is doing in Grocio Prado for which he is being paid for by Cáritas. Unfortunately, something happened to the lens of our main video camera and it is not working at the moment. Good thing it is the weekend so we have some time to look to get it replaced since it is still under warranty and also insured, so doubly protected. Replacements down here are quite expensive unfortunately so we´ll see what we can get. Until then we will use FlipCams.

In the afternoon we hit up a capacity building workshop for local community leaders on the topic of project selection using basic CLIOS methods. The event was headed up by two NGOs, CEAS (episcopalian social action) and CODEHICA (commision for human rights in Ica). We got home real late from this meeting because we spend the next couple hours exchanging footage with Cristian at his team´s office.

From there we have just enough time to eat a quick dinner before heading back home to sleep up for the bike trip tomorrow to the Paracas National Marine Reserve, a very special place for envirolovers. Its unique biodiversity (I saw some birds) is because the sierra reaches the coast at this single point.


Thursday 2 July Crosses come mostly in red
¨You can´t just toss someone in and give them tripe.¨
¨I´m gonna kill you. Aaaaeeeeehhhhhhaaaeehhheeeeaaaeeee. Don´t tickle me. Aaaeee…¨

What factors determine who shows up to community meetings with NGOs? Does education correlate? Does rural vs urban matter, or dispersion of community members? Is it largely a function of individual personality or does it depend largely on group dynamics?

This is a tale about a goat. No, no, many goats. Of the herded variety. They live in Cabeza de Toro, a rural town approximately one hour east and slightly north of Pisco. Every day they go out with a real nice guy who hangs out with them while they gorge themselves on the coastal grasses of the outlying chacras (farms). Then they come home and discuss how they hope to one day have their fuzzy faces appear on TV in a documentary made by foreign college kids. The end.

Thank you Jesus for getting us and five other International Fed. of the Red Cross workers safely to fulfill the dreams of the goats. Jesus, the driver, is the most fun one in the group, and enjoys manhandling the Land Cruiser There is also Richard, a dance teacher who volunteers, Martin, Edwin, and a couple others who neither of us had the chance to interact with. We headed out for this trip at 2pm and didn’t get back till six thirty. The meeting was about VCA (Vulnerabilities and Capacities Assessment). Turns out that Risk (R) = AxV/C where A=Amenazas (Threats).
That was about as far as we got, though, since not enough people showed up to the meeting, so the Red Cross reps decided to hold a more chill meeting and postpone the group activity that they had planned. In addition, the participants hadn´t completed a small homework assignment that would make the conversation much more enriching. We were not too disappointed, as we have sat through a Saturday long workshop on this same topic in the more urban setting of a hotel in Chincha with Red Cross Peruana. It was appropriate to experience firsthand the rural dispersal of participants in Cabeza de Toro created a clear obstacle for bringing the people together for NGO meetings.

After returning to the Red Cross office, we found another meeting going on on the premises. This meeting was actually a better source for footage for us as it was the first class of a 7-week course on preparing community and municipal leaders on how to work with community members to learn about their history and help them prioritize what projects they feel are needed for minimizing the risks they face every day. Basically, this meeting was intended to teach the same as the meeting we had just had cancelled. In one place it was not able to happen, in the other it took place with flying colors and the people were participating avidly in teams without knowing each other beforehand, and producing colorful papelotas (big papers) for understanding the history of their hometowns. And there was ham and cheese sandwiches, and then cake later, and coke.

So, before the Red Cross our day consisted of an early morning interview with ADRA Peru, an Adventists affiliated NGO with a strong presence in the region due to its cooperation with the George Bush-friendly Hunt Oil Corporation that is one of the large players in the exploration known as the Camisea Project. Look it up, its hot. So, Hunt is like, yo we´ll give back to the community by giving some money towards building up the capacity of the local governments in the area we are destroying – in this case they have doubled the size of an oil platform in Pisco to handle the oil being pumped from the Amazon as we speak. So, ADRA is working on Governance and Democracy. Their regional coordinator, Carlos Morales is always very busy but he takes 30 minutes out of his schedule this morning for the interview.

From this interview we learned that is not best to interview NGO reps when they have a tight schedule and a lot on their plate. Turns out you get cookie cutter answers and less insightful answers by orders of magnitude. Nuff said. We will meet him again someday and maybe then…

After this meeting we had a smothie at our new smoothie place, a couple breakfast sandwiches, carapulcra, causa rellena (whipped potato cake with chicken as frosting and a ceviche (raw fish in lime) on the side). After hanging out for a bit, Brooke had the great idea of making sundaes for lunch. At the mention of ice cream, Lindsey was down, so we bought milk and 3 bananas and headed for the ice cream shop. Lindsey is a regular, as was Josie, her predecessor, so the ice cream guy lets us use his glasses and silverware to make the sundaes/splits. 4 scoops of ice cream, bananas, chocalate syrup all doused in whole milk. In the meantime, however, we are blindsided by a guy selling candy from a cart. It looks terribly sugary, so Lindsey goes crazy and buys 20 little animal crackers with a huge dosage of sugar on each. Lindsey had only whetted her appetite however, and bought an unspecified number of personal sized ice cream cones. One was bought for her by a new friend we made from Alaska, Joe, who works as a Remote Wilderness Recreation Consultant and is down here helping start a scalloping tourism adventure in the Paracas area. He is way cooler than us, and has friends that are twice as cool as him in any one arena but are professionals. He also is biking around so we may joing him for a bike road. His bike is a lot nicer than ours. He likes ice cream and other tasty morsels, so him and Lindsey hit it off like old roommates.

After chilling with Joe Alaska we head over to prepare for the Red Cross. And the goats.

After the goats, we eat dinner of a cowfeet stew on rice for Lindsey and Adam, bread for Adam, chicken and vegetable soup for Brooke, ice cream for Lindsey, hamburger for Lindsey, emoliente tea (herbal) for all of us, and french fries with avocado for all of us.

We ate like royalty today. And it all came out at $12 total for all 3.


Wednesday 1 July To-Do lists. Checklists. Do them.
“Let’s do an encuesta. We can ask people what they would prefer as a night cap: ice cream or lettuce. And I’m betting you the ice cream is gonna win out, okay?”

We only had one thing planned for today: an interview with the head macho man of ADRA at 3pm in the Plazuela Belen. Free day! So we wrote down everything we wanted to get done before heading out to Ica at the end of this week.

1. Go to Chincha to retrieve stuff
2. Hang with Pisco Sin Fronteras during their English class with COPRODELI (yet another NGO as aforementioned yesterday)
3. Get Lindsey’s hair braided into corn rows
4. Work on standardizing some of the interviews we’ve done in the past
5. Run over to San Clemente to interview the mayor.
6. ADRA interview

Long list, right? Well, we managed to get most of it done. In fact, we got it all done except for what we had an appointment to do. Here’s a picture of some of the more important things we checked off our list today:

(insert picture of Lindsey’s hairs)

Highlights from San Clemente and El Molino: Lindsey plays with small children who are learning English. She receives hugs and requests to be spun around from eager school kids who tug on her sleeves and ask her to sit next to them. She got to see the most beautiful plaza in the entirety or Peru in San Clemente. In El Molino, she drank a coke. In other news, it is cold here at night.

Highlights from Chincha: Witnessed a small girl screaming for ice cream while waiting on the bus. Reminds us eerily of Lindsey. Encounter a Choche in his natural environment and manage to reminisce about a place neither of us has been – Arequipa. Excitedly get the power cord and sewing kit for endeavors yet to be seen. The future is coming!

First stop in San Clemente to talk with the general coordinator in the mayor’s office there. She is very knowledgeable and tells us all about the way her and the nearby municipalities work. Conveniently, she had worked in an NGO for awhile. She gave us detailed information on the NGOs working in San Clemente and its surrounding area and also gave us a level-headed perspective on how the municipality has moved forward with reconstruction according to the main priority of basic services, mostly water.

Next, off to COPRODELI to hang with PSF while they teach kids English. Four volunteers including Britni, Sean, and Claire, led the classes. All of the kids were very excited, incredibly rambunctious, and ready to play games with the volunteers. They learned the “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” song as well as “hokey pokey.” There was something for everybody, and even the volunteers learned something new!

Then we meet back in the Plazuela Belen to check up on ADRA. The office is absolutely buzzing, but the jefe isn’t there. So we make an early appointment for tomorrow morning to take this to its end once and for all.

Back at the homestead, we organize mucho más. I wouldn’t say it’s like pulling teeth, but it’s like pulling teeth. Actually, in some sense it’s good to remember what we’ve done so we can prepare for Ica. Maybe then our research will be more poignant. Once we’ve had our fill, we make like trees and leave for the market to meet with Fate. Fate is actually a girl named Carito who we met when she and her beautiful cornrows were strutting down the street from the Plaza de Armas with a group of friends. Lindsey pulled over and asked Carito where she had gotten her hair done and made an appointment right then and there. And that was that. And this is now. Now, she looks like that picture. And we look like sleeping beauties.


Tuesday 30 June How can we help you?
“Don’t let Señor Perro run your life. It happened to me once. Never again.”

Here we are again. Sitting on rocks, hands in our pockets with fidgeting legs in front of the Pisco Sin Frontera's house. One is scratching his head over the disappearance of his work shirt. Another is basking in sun before the day of manual labor sets into full swing. All the rest are scurrying to lace their shoes, slather on sunscreen, and don their matching blue t-shirts. Everyone is a little curious; some ask if we've just arrived and congratulations, where did you come from, how long are you staying, the work is fun but its hard, my name is David, Vikki, Jeni, Harold, and so forth.

The morning meeting is at 8am, people walk over to the concrete pour at 9:15, but the program coordinator doesn't leave the house until 10:00. Surrounded by pieces of paper full of messy jots and squiggles of words, Jen is perched on a nest of sheets, peering over the projects that have been labeled “on hold,” “need to call,” and the oh so wanted “completed,” She has another volunteer named Vikki call some of the people that they plan on visiting so that they don't waste money on transportation only to find out that no one is home. Some calls have bad numbers. Others are picked up by seven-year-old girls who also happen to be the oldest person home for the remainder of the day. Despite all this, Jen and Vikki manage to accumulate a stack thicker than I can imagine two people being able to accomplish in one day. Then, we head out.

We take a mototaxi to our first site on Comercio 440 Street. Here, we find a woman who has a land title as well as some governmental aid towards building her house. However, she can't afford the labor to break through the cracked concrete foundations to start building the sewage lines that she needs to begin her house. However, the trench lines aren't marked out, and she doesn't know how deep she should make them. PSF has a very narrow selection metrics. The people who can receive help must have a land title to the terrain that will be worked on, the approval of an architect or engineer for any heavy technical jobs, and the materials to work with. PSF also aims to make sure that they aren't taking money away from the local economy. As Jen puts it, “If they're living in a two story house and they want us to dig a hole for their two car garage, it's obviously not what we are looking for because they obviously have the money to be hiring local labor.”

Afterwards, we headed back to the house to work on making lists of all the organizations we've interviewed, all he meetings that we've attended, and all the other footage that we've taken. We also prep ourselves for our meeting in the small shantytown of El Molino with COPRODELI in the afternoon. We've standardized our questionnaire, added a few other questions, and made sure that we have copies with us at all times. The sun is glaring today. Everything has a haze from the beating rays. The interview goes well, and we learn that this fledgling organization has only been here for about 6 months. Since we interview a field worker, the answers we get mostly concern the way she interacts with the community. We've discovered that we need much different questions depending on whether we talk with an admin or other staff. Jessica tells us about the process of selecting 30 children from hundreds of candidates in the area. She and a professor surveyed the entire region, looking for the poorest of the joven pueblo. She runs the place herself, accompanied by 5 volunteers who are here daily and a couple of medics who come by 3 days a week to offer check ups for 1 sole (aka 30 american cents).

After Lorena waves bye to some kids like fifty million times, we finally escape the grasps of the C.A.E. (Centro Atención Externa). Then our stubby, little legs bring us all the way back to the Plazuela Belen where Adam introduces us to his newest girl: 50 centimos sandwich lady with 1.00 sole liquados. Heaven. We buy a little milk for a banana honey and milk smoothie which she only charges 50 centimos for since we had all the ingredients already. We watch for the ADRA people to come back to the office from their lunch break, but to no avail. They walk in the back door, and the man we want to interview never came back. In fact, he went to Lima. So we make some calls to the remaining NGOs we hoped to talk with and score one in Humay, an hour away in the mountains. The other one, Tierra de Hombres has relocated out of Pisco and back to Lima.

So we fly through the market, hold our hands out, collect food for our ravenous mouths, and hit up the hotel for a sandwich making party. Lettuce, avocados, cheese like no one's business. All for less than a dollar each. We've getting good at this cheap food game.

So we hippity hoppity boppity'd onto a collectivo towards Humay for 3 soles each (think dollar taxi ride for an hour). The sun was setting pretty quickly by the time we ended up on the foothills of the little town of 90 families. The church that used to be has been entirely cleared out and replaced with a modular home. Such is the story with many of the leveled religious centers in Peru. The strong sense of community from religion, however, is something that Cáritas uses for their advantage. Cáritas carries itself very close to the church. For example, Luis is staying in a building on the main square that is dedicated to housing volunteers and workers related to the parish. As a Catholic organization, Cáritas is able to tap into the pre-established social structure to do its good. This way they don't have to form and mobilize new groups of people who may not know each other yet. Church is a very powerful tool for activating a community... Thanks Caesar McDowell and Sebastiao Ferreria.

Luis Peña Muñoz is a great interview despite our camera who can’t see through the shadows that are cast over his face from the powerful combination of falling daylight and brimmed hats . He tells about how the entire team did surveys of the entire town to find out the needs. Cáritas is a global organization, but the arms of the group set down in small communities in needy places so that the work they do is focusing on one community at a time. They also work to make their talks demonstrative as well as participative in order to help make their point stick better. There is a set-up for hand washing workshops. There is also a small kitchen and cooking example for nutrition lectures complete with little stoves. As Ascensión from the Red Cross might say, Cáritas wants to do the hardware (houses) as well as the software (social development) for the whole package of recovery. Not just to clear the rubble or to build from the ground up, but also to enrich and strengthen the community’s social fabric (as Dan from ASPEm would say).

One thing Luis tried to stick with us before we left was the idea that there aren't many engineers who will go through the pains of getting an education to be employed somewhere where the pay isn't good. He said he hoped we were that kind of people. Since he has an appointment in Pisco later that night, he accompanies us on the way home, chatting about the earthquake and giving us a little more informal description of his work. It's a nice opportunity to get to know him better.

Back at headquarters, a threat is detected in sector B-019. Alert the main deck and hoist up the emergency flag. Caldo de Gallina for almost half the normal price.. 2 soles! 3 soles with meat! And boy is it delicious. Like Adam's new hair color. Which takes about an hour and a half to tease out a dye job from a set of jolly gay hair dressers in the local salon. They were so happy to chat with some foreigners sobre de todo. And in the end, we all slept like babies.

Mira! Señor Perro!

Sunday June 28
“My very first cock fight.”

The wedding raged on so late last night that no one could get good sleep. Por ejemplo, un hombre cantó muy tarde (casi 3 de la mañana) en la pasillo. So we slept really late, woke up to work more on organizing our contacts, and then slathered on some sunscreen to hit up Paracas. We've tried in the past to work on the weekends by doing encuestas through neighborhoods. However, the answers we usually get by knocking on doors are very short because they're not into being bothered by extranjeros on their weekends. We'll try again next weekend by just sitting in the Plaza and asking people who walk by.

The bike to Paracas is 21 km. Lindsay holds up just great in the ridiculous wind. I would say it was at points more than 30 mph with desert sands that basically made you bike with your eyes closed. Anyways, we ended up trying to tomar el sol, pero so much sand ended up on us that we had to wash it from our ears when we got home. We hung out on a wrecked ship on the beach mientras estabamos sacando fotos, ate a million egg sandwichs, and decided against going to the actual reserve at that point in time since we only had so much time and so much wind deterring us.

So we went home, rode our bikes soooo long without handlebars with the wind on our backs. And somehow, we ended up in San Andres in the middle of a crown ´round a couple of birds fighting, blades tied to their feet. It was ... crazy. Their feathers fluffed up around their necks, their beaks went at each other, and everyone looking on was glazed over in awe. After one fight, we decided we had seen it all and left. In the Pisco Plaza de Armas, we ate din din. There is a couple who works at this chicken sandwich cart who we like to hit up. They are really ridiculously in love. Like chicken sandwich making love. They spend all their time together (starting at 7 am) to prepare for their night selling chicken sandwiches. For 30 cents!! Oh geez, they're so good. Lindsay ate 4 ice cream cones today. That's like... one more than three. And she ate some chocolate cake. And popcorn. And churros. And bread. And smoothie. And carapulcra. Which is approximately 40 times more than she ate on her first day here.

Afterwards, we go to the opening for the fiesta in San Andres which is already in full swing by the time we arrive. Carnival-esque you might say. We don't stay long because we plan on waking up early tomorrow morning to hang out with Pisco Sin Fronteras


Saturday June 27, 2009
“This one will be Pamela Andercat. That one is Samuel L Catson. You're Princess. That one's Kitter Katter. Flounder. And you will be stinky butt.”

7am wake-up again – but this time we go back to bed because we've been NGO-ing nonstop. Then we realize we have to get our bikes at the Red Cross office at 8am so we hop out of the bed and into the streets with our dancing feets. We hit up a juice man for juice. We hit up the key man for keys. And then the bread guy for bread .And the cheese guy for cheese for grand sanwichs of avocado, cheese, bananas, and jam. Then we wash laundry for hours. And hours. And hours. Oh my god. But it's cool cause Lorena names the cats as you've read above.

We organize a bit more, standardizing our encuestas, interview questions, and other massive amounts of data. We figure, if we can get things under wrap before we head out into the big, scary world we can then be prepared for almost anything. We are basically incapable of moving out of bed from being up and working from our sometimes 12 + hour work days... so we listen to the loud, tacky music from the wedding outside our door in our hotel and party a little while we work on the lappy.

When we finally do taste fresh air, we bask for all its worth. Lindsay's incessant “helado” chant finally moved us from horizontal mattress-ridden to walking again. So we went out to the Plaza finally to grab some dinner of chicken feet soup during which we were rudely interrupted. A man on stilts, humping the air and being accompanied by a talented drummer, flew into the market to entertain us... and totally rip us off. We end up trying to give him a sole, but he only gives us 2 back from our 5. Lesson learned, again. Good job Lindsay for... not trying the feet. We expected much more from you, young lady. The soup also came with a little heart, mmmmm, our favorite. Actually, let's take that back. Liver is the best, hands down.

Anyways, then we headed out but got blind-sighted by donuts in syrup. A lady selling phone cards tried to convince Brooke to switch spots with her so she could go home. After chatting about volunteers in the region, hostals, and Adam's excellent cooking skills, the phone-selling-lady also tried to recruit Adam as her chef. Then she threw some mandarins our way for being such funny people.

Somehow, we ended up sitting around the Plaza and watching people until the end of the night. When we got back, we turned and tossed as the wedding raged on late late late. It was a good day to recover.


June 26, 2009
“Santa doesn't give anything to people who kill puppies.”

1:30am - We fell asleep uploading. Today our camera usage consumed the complete anion potential of both batteries, the internal memory and nearly all 16 extra GB of SD cards.

10pm – After arriving back in Pisco we enjoyed our nightcap of ice cream for Lorena, herbal tea for Brooke and another sandwich for Adam. Then we headed back to the room.

8 pm – We ate dinner in San Clemente before leaving – liver and potatoes with noodles in a sauce and soup. Topped by a chicken sandwich and some french fries, bananas, peanuts, and french fries. All for about $3.

4:30pm – The meeting has 2 agendas: outlet for community leader complaints and questions towards the mayor and his past 3 years of promises, and to elect 2 new public officials to serve as advisors to replace those that were voted out of office by the same committee a few months ago. The Q and A with the mayor went as smoothly as you might think and it was interesting to see the input of 2 NGOs – CEAS and Derechos Humanos (Human Rights). The leaders were chosen after a painstakingly democratic process of electing the people who were in charge of running the democratic election. It was all very....long, and very political, oh so political. Many good speeches though, and it was interesting to see how our first perceptions of the candidates correlated closely to the final outcome of the elections.

2:30pm – Red Cross drops us off at San Clemente, just outside of the site of the elections for new public advisors to the mayor. We eat lunch at a small restaurant nearby – Escaveche de Pollo – basically onions and chicken in a sauce over rice.

1:15pm – Red Cross treats us with a short detour to the nearby Laguna Morona – a.k.locally.a. “mermaid lake” since there apparently exist multiple reports of a female voice that calls out to males from the town by name.

Noon – Interview Karen from Peace Corps. She is from Michigan and has been stationed in Bernales for almost 6 months now. She had to go through the grueling training process for three months in Lima before being able to take station here for the next year and a half for a total of two years like with any other Peace Corps assignment. She basically gives us tips on how to administer encuestas in a way that elicits honest, useful answers. She also explains how she chooses, executes, and evaluates her projects.

9am – Arrive in Bernales, which is a district east of Pisco, not yet getting into the sierra mountains. This is the most dessertesque place that we have yet been. Breakfast finished off on the way. As soon as we get out we are greeted warmly by Nery, the Red Cross coordinator for the town of Bernales – another volunteer – who is also the director of the town's population. The town runs off the cotton industry which only brings in income for 3 months out of the year. The males in the town work from 4am to 5pm every day during cotton season as hired farm hands. After that, however, there is no work for them.

Nery explains that the Red Cross is really the only NGO that has brought aid to their town since immediate relief in the first few months after the earthquake. 110 homes are being built out of quincha, which is a building technology that uses walls made of woven sugarcane stalks covered with mud and a cement facade. The roof is supported by wooden beams and the floor is a thin layer of concrete. Basically, this technology has developed as an available, flexible, lightweight, inexpensive, but outwardly unnoticeable alternative to bricks.

The Red Cross is involved in many other community development projects in the area and is currently putting a lot of effort into organizing and equipping the community to use its own resources to rebuild and move forward.

8:20am – Leave with Red Cross. Jesus is the driver and he's real fun. Rita too, the Red Cross volunteer stationed in Bernales and left with the inglamorous task of showing us around. The truck we jump in is a white Land Rover with the Red Cross emblem plastered on the front and sides.

7:55am – Arrive at the Pisco office of the Red Cross Federation.

7:30am – Buy 8 breads, 3 bags of grapefruit and papaya juice, 1 bottle of Maca drink, 2 ham sandwiches, 1 egg sandwich, 1 small bottle of yogurt, and 1 middle-sized bottle of yogurt. The most we have spent on breakfast in awhile - $5. No time to eat though, so we stash it for the road.

6:45am – Wake-up


25 June Thursday El DIA DE PAZ
“Things are always pooping on my head. Let's just say poop is my middle name”

So today was full. Like we were full of food and the day was just bursting with NGO meetings. For instance, today we ate large smoothies, 16 pieces of bread, fish soup, raw fish, ham sandwiches, coffee, ice cream, diet cokes, soup, rice, and fried fish too. Oh and more ice cream. Oh yeah, and a chicken sandwich for Talsma to top the night off. And I quote, “I'm never really full until I eat that sandwich sandwich.”

The NGOs that we contacted today: Paz y Esparanza (peace and hope), Cuerpo de Paz (Peace Corps), ADRA (... we'll fill this in later ... ), Cruz Roja (Red Cross), and a few community members from San Clemente. Our first interview was at 11:30 am so we had a slow morning for Lauren to recuperate from her ridiculous travel here from outside of Philly. We went to San Andres for breakfast smoothies in bags. Bolsitas are for meals and drink para llevar- juice in a bag to go. It's amazing what you can put in there without compromising the integrity or presentation of the food. It's so much less wasteful than styrofoam, plastic, and paper cups from McDonalds. Although we'd probably have do an LCA to determine the validity of that statement to take into consideration the evaluation's scope. You know, gotta normalize those functional units and make sure to take into consideration recycling and remanufacturing and what not. But instinctively, it feels like it is more “green.” There's a whole lot of talk of sustainable projects here in Peru, but we've never seen a good definition of such a thing yet.

So we head out to meet with Jaime Mok. His office is just a stone's throw away from the Red Cross Peruvian branch. The office is shared between Paz y Esparanze (PE) and Acción Contra el Hambre (ACH, Action Against Hunger). This is the first indicator of the unique feature of PE- this NGO works very closely with other NGOS. So close, Jaime jokes, that they even share the same bathroom in the office. PE has worked with Red Cross to organize projects together, with PNUD to participate in “mesas de viviendas,” and ACH in ways we've already demonstrated. Mesas de Viviendas is essentially a way of saying that PNUD organized a weekly night where all people interested in working on or were already working on aiding the reconstruction of homes in Pisco can get together to compare and discuss projects in an open environment. Their coordination far outstrips what we've seen so far here. Just to demonstrate further... As we walked through the front of the office, we had to duck in front of a meeting happening in between PE and ACH to get upstairs to Jaime's office.

During the interview, we learn that PE is largely funded by evangelical institutions such as churches in the states, the tear fund in the UK, and the United States' branch of Peace and Hope. The funds in Independcia, the region that his branch works in, the funds are open to be spent towards mostly any project they decide is appropriate. This is a much different manner of funding than for American organizations like the Cruz Roja Americana who only donates to specific projects. In general this is to ensure that institutions are spending money on what donors deem worthwhile. Jaime explains that their work is in Independencia, as an attempt to make a focused effort to target an area that hasn't had much attention from NGOs. This matches up quite up a bit with what we've been discovering with our surveys of different regions. It seems as though some neighborhoods can list several NGOs in a split seconds whereas others will give blank stares to questions like, “what NGOs work in this region?” This is the other unique feature of this Pisco NGO.. Like ASPEm in Tambo de Mora, their work is very concentrated. In Jaime's opinion, this makes their work much more effective than NGOs trying to work in several regions at once.

Jaime's interview went very well, and he surprised us at the end by speaking nearly perfect English to his wife who entered the room right after we finished. We rode off to find ADRA's office afterwards only stopping a few times to force our non-fluent Spanish speakers to ask for directions and to eat this weird thing called an elephant ear which is actually fried dough covered in honey.

There was only one lone soul at the ADRA office who kindly explained that everyone else was out to lunch and about to set up for a meeting in San Andres. Remember all the “Participatory Budgeting” from San Clemente and Pisco where municipalities are collecting the community's opinion on budgeting? Yeah, well ADRA was running a meeting at 3pm with the municipalities to describe how to best utilize those opinions. So we decide to hit that up. After 3 sole ceviche, of course.

At the meeting, we decide that it's really just a review of 1.011 (project evaluation class from our department back home). We record a bit, eat some refreshments, and take a packet of their materials to review back at home. Unfortunately, we had to leave the meeting early to catch our 6:30 interview with the Director de Programa Agua y Saneamiento from Peace Corps. From the Plaza de Armas in Pisco, we scope out our next victim. Jorge Izaquirre is at the shoe shining stand, just waiting for us to put him under the light of our questions.

In the interview, we figure out that the Peace Corps is hardcore. The volunteers in Peru are subjected to a session of “getting used to food here” where they eat foods that are mixed with specific bacterias from Peru in Lima. That way if they get extremely sick, they can be treated where there is good medical care. He also tells us that he believes that the defining characteristic of the organization that helps it to have more impact is its bottom-up approach. There are a few other defining moments from the interview, but what we most remember is the several attempts to get recruited. If only we weren't 3rd year and off-to-grad-school students.

Anyways, a la sosie, we get one chicken sandwich and 4 scoops of ice cream to cap off our night. Then we go home to do the “clean the camel back in as many innovative, ingenius and stupid looking ways possible,” “upload so much footage it makes your head hurt because there is just way too much documenting occurring,” and “reading books with a little bit of spanish but mostly dirty words in order to 'learn more'” jobs.

Pobre Chico

Wednesday, June 24 – Lindsey arrives!
"There's this bug that pokes a personal hole in the female and aprovechars of that hole."

Lindsey gave us a wake-up call at 4:45am. (Lindsey = Lauren Biscombe. MIT '09, and a fellow Course 1 stud) She was on a cab to the bus station. This left us with a mere 13.75 hours without being bothered by other MIT kids while being in Peru. She gave us the second wake-up call at 8:50am. First visual contact between Brooke and Lindsey was later but they didnt care to note the exact hour at which this momentous interaction occured.

Breakfast was a juice of apple, orange, banana, spinach and 12 little breads – 4 wheat, 4 sweet, and 4 french. Total: 9.20 soles ~ $3. From here we biked off to San Clemente which is about 30 mins away by bike. Lindsey kept with us all the way and pulled ahead on the hills. Josie are you reading this? We located the two NGO offices in town we were targeting for the day – ADRA and CEAS. Both happen to be the social outreach branch of churches – Adventist and Catholic respectively. After introducing Lindsey to tallerines (noodles with spagghetti-esqe sauce) and papas a la huacayina (potatoes and cheesy milk sauce) and caldo de gallina (chicken soup) we headed to our CEAS interview where they are playing with some cool bamboo building techniques. By the way, Adam had to eat all of Lindsey's food cuz she eats too slowly.

The CEAS interview goes well and afterwards we meet the french architects, who study in the Peruvian University of San Martin and are the technical advisors to the bamboo construction project. They were building a two-story house out of bamboo using innovative two-way floor designs. In addition, they showed off their bamboo dome and bamboo conference room, not to mention their bamboo watchtower that Brooke noted could be seen from far down the highway.

The focus of this NGO is on teaching construction skills to youth in the area and to work on small development projects that help families reconstruct. This was the first organization we found that really stressed how helpful the role of PNUD (UN branch) in coordinating between NGOs, municipalities, and the people. Interestingly enough, CEAS also collaborated with quite a few other NGOs on many projects. Another interesting part of CEAS is that it relies heavily upon local pastors and priests to obtain the needs from the people and to also communicate with the people throughout the project.

After the CEAS interview, we biked home – by a new way, and stopped to do surveys in the El Molino community. This community is full of earthquake refugees who relocated to uninhabited land and have slowly set up more and more permanent residence even though no one has land titles. They are working on this, though, and have organized themselves at least somewhat in order to petition for land titles. There is also rumors of the government forcing them off the land before the two-year anniversary of the earthquake, but that seems impossible given the size and permanence of the informal settlement. As expected, the people here have received little to no aid since the immediate relief after the earthquake and they are understandably bitter. There is also a lot of talk about corruption within the municipality directed towards them because they do not have land titles and therefore are diffecult to track when donations are made. Brooke does her first encuesta on her own and is now making complete and coherent sentences in spanish. 1 month of hard work and effort towards picking up the language is definately put on display. Lindsey refuses, claiming she needs to aclamate herself to the survey culture first.

During the surveys we met another NGO working in the region – COPRODELI. This organization had set up an after-school, and health care center in the middle of town. Unfortunately this establishment can only cater to around 30 children, so only a few within the community are able to benefit from it. We set up an interview with them on Monday. Also, they had recently met randomly with Pisco Sin Fronteras about teaching English to the kids, and it seems they have set up next Wednesday as their first meeting. Maybe we will show up to that as well.

Anyways, after it gets nearly dark, we hop back on our bikes and pedal the last bit to home - stopping only to get orange juice at the plaza central. After the daily chores of uploading and blogging we find that it is useful to have a third person around filming and manning some other equipment – gps, flipcam, handycam, still camera, smartpen and notebook.

Now we are about to head out to grab dinner before coming back home for the night to read a bit, laugh a bit, love a lot, and sleep a lot, Sir Lancelot. Potrotjot. Or not.

Tuesday, June 23 – CEAS, ADRA, and some really ticked off community members
"Would you rather drown or burn to death? How do you feel about arranged marriage? How many brothers do you really have? What if your dad came here right now and told you you had to marry x girl? How many sheep would you have to pay?"

Our first interview of the day is with CEAS at the new catholic church on Pisco Playa. However, our interviewee had forgotten about our appointment and instead invites us to a meeting he is attending later in the day that is being run by ADRA in San Clemente. We happily agree and head back to the hotel room to send Josie off on the Flores bus to Lima. As we write, he is on his plane, headed to another paradise. We've found that making appointments is nearly usually less useful as opposed to simply stopping by NGO offices. Just a little something we've learned from NGOs about Peruvians since we've been here: do it in person, call them twice, and make sure to send an e-mail if you're not certain they remember you.

So we hang with Josie a bit before he heads off, celebrating with one last four scoop sundae (less than a dollar) topped with chocolate sauce and a wafer. Immediately after he boards the bus, we book towards San Clemente for our 4pm meeting. His directions are vague: main street at a local place. Right, so we do that. And manage to get further down the dirt roads than Josie's bus does in thirty minutes when it passes us while we ask for directions. Pisco is situated on the beach, Las Americas heads directly away from the beach where it makes a T with the Pan Americana. At this T is the villa de Tupac Amaru where UNICA (ooh-knee-kuh) is snugly situated among the dusty calles. North of here, towards Ica, is the town of San Clemente and the road that heads up into the mountains towards the region of Humay (where our meeting with PNUD in Quitasol took place). It's about a 30 or 40 minute bike ride, up hill, but the sun is shining so everything is alright.

In San Clemente, you find a very well constucted Plaza de Armas (PS every city has a plaza de armas which is essentially the city square around which everything revolves). It has a concrete shell pond with a small bridge over it, several terraces connected by stairs, and well-lit surrounding areas. The people here seem much more well off than the people in Pisco Playa or El Molina. We look around, locate the municpal building, and then sneak up on an ADRA guy who is knocking on the front door. We ask him for directions to the CEAS meeting which he gives surprisngly quickly considering that we saw him arrive in a taxi not two minutes ago.

So we set off, peek in, and sit down inside the tavern which has plastic lawn chairs with pictures of beer on the back of them. The place probably can fit 60+ people. There are only 5 people there fifteen minutes before the meeting, but by 4:30, when they start there are almost 30. At 5:00, an hour after the scheduled opening, the room fills up with probably 50 upwards to capacity. So goes Peruvian time. The meeting opens with a municipal worker who welcomes the audience who consist of community leaders from San Clemente annd its annexos (surrounding villages).

Then the ADRA guy we saw in front of the municipal building stands up to start the meeting which was a surprise. Our interviewee was simply attending the meeting, not running it. Ooops for thinking CEAS was running it. Anyways, ADRA proceeds to talk about social, economic, institutional, and environmnetal development. They talk about the statements from last year's meeting, and begin to open up the floor to the people to comment on the vision for 2021 that was established in the last meeting (a year ago). This workshop is a partipatory program so the talking from the audience is plenty. In fact, so strong-willed and so opinionated that they begin to take over the meeting. Everyone comments on the fact that the municipality is supposed to be collecting their opinions but the municipal representatives left. This, according to the community, is typical behavior from their mayor. With a year left in office, the people are fed up with this treatment and are frustrated that the municipality has yet to authorize proposals for a comprehensive city reconstruction plan.
In any case, the people cause quite a ruckus to the point that ADRA gives up and asks for a vote. Who wants to stay? Who wants to go? And the majority rules. The meeting is let out. We gather tons and tons of feedback afterwards. We are invited back on Friday at 9am, 3pm, and 5pm to various meetings ranging from a one on one interview to another meeting with the same people run by themselves instead of the NGO leading the way. We are also invited to another meeting tomorrow at 3pm which will involve us talking to a woman who is very unsatisfied with the Red Cross. Everyone here is articulate and passionate. We wonder if it is a function of their income bracket. Could communities with more money have more time to participate in meetings like this, put time and effort into interacting with NGOs, and taking advantage of getting their opinions heard? I think there is a strong connection.

Anyways, we return home by bike after the discussion. On the ride home, we grab churros and bike oil. We eat one and use the other to clean up our chains in the Pisco Plaza de Armas. We grab orange juice, tea, and a chicken sandwich to tide us over until breakfast tomorrow. We run into Phol and Julie in the front of our hostal and chat with them for awhile about Pisco. The neighborhoods, the tourism, and about the NGOs in the region.

Now for some massive uploading, blogging, and transcribing data from our meeting. And then BED. Oh sweet, bed.

Monday, June 22 – Pisco Sin Fronteras!
"Where's the duct tape?"

So today is our last full day with Josie. And you know what he does? He wakes up at 6:20 in the morning to go on an all day tour of Paracas. Pfft. Meanwhile, we are racing over to San Andres to get our fill of orange fruits and vegetable juice: carrots, oranges, and papaya. It is delicious, but we are crestfallen to find out that the other significant Jose of our lives, Jose the Juice Man, will also be leaving us... for a week. But his prices and zest were the best of Peru, so we are sad to lose him. He advises us to visit his brother in the Pisco market, but I'm certain he will not be able to compare, charge us more than 2 soles per cup, and just not be the.. same.

After the (heart) breaking news has been dropped on us like a bomb from 10,000 feet high, we decide to drown our miseries by biking as fast our little legs can carry us towards our NGO of the day quien se llama "Pisco Sin Fronteras." This is the first largely English-speaking NGO so it should be a completely different experience. Their 8am meeting is held every morning besides Sunday in the back of the volunteer's home on Pisco Playa.

This morning, they are joined by several new faces, but no one is phased. Introducing new volunteers is simply part of the daily routine. Every one is merrily eating breakfast, with antique american rock music in the background, when we arrive. We say hello to the familiar faces from Saturday and while we sip on our orange wonderjuice, we wait for the director to start the meeting. He announces a few things, asks if any one else would like to announce anything, and then asks the new people to introduce themselves. People are from all over the world, including Australia, Columbia, Mexico and Boston.

People mostly hear about this place from friends or through the Internet. Beginner's are taken in with full arms, even if they are non-spanish speaking. In the evenings, there is exchanges of Spanish-English lessons so you're bound to learn quick while volunteering. Afterwards, Jeni takes the board. She is the project coordinator of six months who keeps track of all the sites. She looks a bit frazzled, but in a sort of satisfying smiley sort of sense. There are 5 jobs for today: concrete pouring, bamboo moving, medical center logistics, trench digging, and a UNICEF project. She says how many people are needed on each site, ensures that a Spanish-speaker is on each, and finds places for left-overs. The two directors also make sure that a few people volunteer to clean up breakfast and dinner dishes as well as the bathrooms. Morale here is high, and people are all of good cheer.

So then they finish eating breakfast while we interrogate a few people. We get addresses to all the sites, learn a bit more about Assessments, and start to discern who is best to talk to about our project for more information. Our plan of action is to skip one of the sites which is out of the way, start with the furthest job, and make our way back towards the beach throughout the day to end with the most volunteer-rich job of concrete pouring for some quality footage. Since there won't be any one doing Assessments today (basically, walking around neighborhoods asking if any one needs manual labor for their homes, filling in some forms about each household that is surveyed, and communicating these needs back to Harold for further assessment), we lose out on a chance to observe some project evaluation and selection processes which we have yet to witness.

In the truck, there are several blankets for the community of El Molina, a small makeshift town between the coast and the Pan-Americana. The people that live there are mostly made up from those who used to have homes situated right along the ocean. Homeless after the earthquake, the community migrated further inland to construct new homes in a dusty bowl right off Las Americas (the main road from the Pan Americana towards Pisco). Here, Pisco Sin Fronteras will be doing work on two sites: altering a makeshift structure for one of the community leaders here and doing some logistical work behind the medical building that PSF put in recently. The work here is visible, from the waterlines that were installed by the volunteers in January to the child care building. The communication between PSF and María (the community leader) is done on a twice a week basis, mostly over phone and in person. Both projects have been proposed by the communities themselves.

After seeing the initial interactions between María and the volunteers, largely consisting of her telling them where to move her house, she left to go negotiate with some Cuban doctors in Tupac Amaru. We followed her there to see a sort of miscommunication occur, resulting in a delay of the opening of El Molina's medcenter. So we grabbed our bikes and check out the large project closer to the coast off Las Americas. 15 homes in a small cluster being sponsored by a religious group. Unfortunately, the team had already finished so we weren't able to witness any action.

Then we set off to call fathers from the Locutorio, eat orange juice, and try new sweets from the market. The day passes a little slowly, so we decide to take a random sample of surveys from the people with homes on the beach. Largely, they are familiar with PSF and a few are friends with M.A.D. One mentions UNICEF, but for such an NGO-rich community, there is very little awareness anymore. Before dinner, we head out to conduct a more formalized interview with the director from PSF.

Harold is originally from Pisco, he's the cool one, remember? Anyways, he is very kind and takes us into their headquarters which also doubles as a home for volunteers. There are two houses where volunteers pay for their food and lodging at a much cheaper rate than any of the hospedajes in the area. We walk past a slew of volunteers attentively engaging in discussion, some waiting for the guitar to start up while others spit passionately in their conversations. Harold kindly invites us to his room, where we hold the interview.

Here, we learn much more about PSF. Two things. First, NGOs can work together to build off one another to evolve and morph into a more efficient entities with entirely new leadership, name, and mission statements. Second thing, an NGO can function entirley without funds yet still generate labor and useful products after establishing their presence. In any case, Harold has been a leading force for PSF. His work there has tied their vision together into a cohesive body of workers that hold true to their word. As duly noted with Cruz Roja, having the work of a local (i.e. Harold) can really keep an NGO or group of volunteers true to their course. In my opinion, one of the amazing parts of this NGO is the ability to host non-Spanish speaking volunteers and yet turn them into useful labor. Harold also talks about some of the NGO's less successful projects. The largest that PSF has taken on was coordinated to take place with another NGO called Espacio Expresion, but fell through due to frustrating conditions. Apparently miscommunications about whether the school-to-be would be private or public. He seemed rather bothered that such a promising project hadn't been followed to completion, but he also knew what made it unsuccessful. In any case, the entire interview proved a stark contrast to many of the NGOs we've worked with thus far.

Then we took the rest of the night off to mourn Josie's departure tomorrow by eating a lot of street food and sundaes. Bueno suerte con todos, Josie :( At least Lauren will show in about two days. Hooray for more company.

Sunday, June 21 – Happy Father's Day!
“Take it off.”
“No one is taking anything off, Josie.”
“Speak for yourself.”

Breakfast for the first time in Pisco market. It is not up to par. Maybe its a function of the teeming masses and the buzz of many bodies buying food in the morning. The prices were higher for heavy breakfast dishes of rice and chicken and saucy sauces. The juices were simply not Jose and unwilling to flex. Oh, and they lied about the prices.

Not having time to even finish our juices, we headed over to our 10am interview with Ascension Martinez, Head of the International Red Cross Federation's Earthquake Reconstruction Program in Peru. She is from Spain. She is from Australia. She has 3 degrees and is bien chevere. She has worked with numerous NGOs in Vietnam, Cambodia, the Andes, India, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Australia, and maybe more but she lost me by then. The interview went well, but mostly because Brooke was running the show. Ms. Red Cross Chevere did much more than simply answer our questions and gave us a lot of useful information on the organization. She also took time out of her Sunday to show us the Red Cross office and the events they have coming up. We hope to check out some of their events, and by that I mean we will. She also is kind enough to confirm Brooke's suspicions that the Peruvian diet of sugar juice, potatoes, and rice is simply not enough. So there.

Basically the Red Cross does a lot more than people think – i.e. not just health. They get their hands dirty by building homes as well as hosting workshops on community risk realization and mitigation. The interview whipped up realizations that the success of an organization is largely a function of the people who are on the ground doing the work. These people, in turn, are largely a function of a principled culture and foundation upon which they are hired. Whatever that sentence means, ask Adam. Anyways, Red Cross seems to have this down when it comes to the Pisco office. The mix of outside help along with local Pisco volunteers is very successful here. Their volunteers have to go through an application process which includes some personal interviews with serious evaluation. She praised their work ethics, dedication and..

Happy Father's Day, Pop!

...communication skills.

During the interview, I got a great shot of an NGO worker opening and locking doors. Later, we had to go through and weed through all the footage since Adam's overexcitement and camera withdrawal caused a serious overclicking of the record button. It's cool though. Happens to the best of us, so Adam claims.

After the interview, we ran a few errands, recapped where we stood and planned our schedule a bit more for the upcoming week. We also tried to find an open international calling center but not of the cheap ones were open, so we will have to settle for calling Dads tomorrow. Sorry :(

To make up for it, we gladly fulfilled our promise to visit our former host in Chincha and wished our host father a Feliz Dia del Padre. We bought a cake before arriving. It was sort of dry. Josie was a wuss and made us eat the rest of his food. What a surprise. His stomach is like the size of a walnut. Our host mom made aji de gallina, which was excellent, and Brooke sniffed out the peanuts, which were a part of the excellency. Of course, we asked how it was made so we can try to disastrously duplicate the delicious dinery of this place. Did we ever mention food before on the blog? I thought not. After chatting with them and catching up, we headed over to a friend's place with Choche, our host, to meet some of his friends. There we met a group of people with diverse levels of cognizance.

We have to wake up real early tomorrow to hang out with the Pisco Sin Fronteras crowd so we had to leave around 9pm. We had a decent trip ahead of us including a colectivo (taxi on a route), a bus, and a micro-bus (taxi agragandado), but we kept our balance. And Adam proceeded to take more film as if this morning wasn't enough. Thanks.

And then there were none.

Saturday, June 20 – Happy Belated Bday Uncle Steve!
“Oh my gawd, thats awesome. Sneaky old ladies, I love them!”

Yo so today we like biked to a new hostel, because the one we were staying at was way outta Josie and Brooke's league. By that I mean it was $8 per night for three people. So now we are staying at a place that is under $3 per night per 3 chicos. And it would be less if you don't include the money the owner lady from the hostel refused to give us back because we stuck around past midday. Bitter is sweet.

Before moving, though, we stopped by two English-speaking, volunteer-rich NGOs. The first was Pisco Sin Fronteras. We immediately met Daniel, a Yale student who is volunteering there along with many others from around the world. Daniel's cool, and takes us over to meet Harold who runs the place. Harold is chill. Harold is from Pisco. Harold recommended our new hostel to us. Harold said life should be lived. Harold said we could come by and interview/tape up a storm on Monday. Harold, you're cool too.

Then we met up with MAD (Making A Difference) which was nearby. It is run by Dominick and Kate. They also seem cool and are willing to hang out with us later in the week. They tell us a little bit about their work and the structure of how they find their volunteers. Or well, how their volunteers find them. Both these NGOs seem to have been born from the same NGO at some point and are also related Burners without Borders somehow. But we'll find out more on interview day(s). Will they reveal their secrets? Will the truth be told? Will life be unveiled in mannerisms unforseen? Stay tuned to find out.

Remix. Breakfast in the market again. Jose, the juice guy, made us delicious juices of fruits and carrots – again. Life is good. All Joses are clearly not created equal. Josie thinks he is related to Jose cuz all Joses are related. We're not entirely convinced. Then we ate some carapulcra with spicy aji while sitting on the other side of the big penguin statue on the beach. Thankfully, we've hit the ground running since we've been here. We have interviews on every day this week, including two on Tuesday, up until Sunday. Saturday holds promise for another all-day Red Cross extravaganza. Unfortunately, we won't be seeing Jose much before he leaves for Mexico on Tuesday since he's visiting Paracas tomorrow. This means he has to get up at 6:20, an unprecedented wake up call.

We painted a bit at the end of the night to re/unwind. Josie has hidden talents that only show themselves when he is painting Adam. Too bad he is leaving otherwise we would start generating income from his paintings. And his fried plantains. And Brooke made a magic pineapple orbiting as a moon around another planet and some fresh, hot, pancakezzz. Adam painted in a picture from an earlier drawing session from the week as well as an abstract scene of people walking on multi-colored sidewalk/plank things on which he refused to comment. Artists are so complicated.

Somewhere on our Saturday night, we also checked out the Plaza de Armas, where Josie and Adam ate even more street food. Que deliciosa.

Sleepy time.