01/11/2008

It takes surprisingly little time for a double-decker bus to circumnavigate Lima and start cruising steadily south on the Pan-American highway, which passes through Peru on its epic journey from Alaska to the southern tip of the continent. Civilization thins, and pretty soon you’re looking out at a vast desert. It reminds you of the Star Wars scene where Luke Skywalker is out in the wasteland looking for that old guy. The perpetual dust and smog of the sprawling city gives way – almost suddenly – to a drier, clearer climate. To your left as far as you can see, it’s nothing but barren dunes punctuated by the occasional skeleton of a forgotten billboard or a political symbol painted on a sandstone hillside. To your right the Pacific Ocean stretches out thousands of miles toward the other side of the world; sizable waves crash on the shore, which is less a series of individual beaches than a single, deserted, treeless coastline spanning hundreds of miles in either direction. Eventually, a few hours south of the capital, signs of life reemerge. To the left, landfills – smoldering if not actually on fire, fuming natural gas refineries, and small settlements of workers that conjure images from The Grapes of Wrath, minus the cars. Vivid irrigated fields clash with the arid, beige-colored landscape. To the right, chicken farms on the beach give way to high-walled fish-packing plants and all the commotion and smells that go along with them. The endless coastline is no longer empty but dotted with small fishing boats in neat lines, moored together in the little bays. Farther out in the azure waters lie the silhouettes of oil tankers and cruise ships. Even if you’ve never been to the Persian Gulf, you’re pretty sure this is what it looks like.

The WatSan crew arrived at our hostel in Paracas around five PM after a relatively short three-plus hour drive from the city. And quickly realized that we’d been hooked up in a major way. The second-story back patio had a fully-stocked bar and looked right out at the ocean, and although we could smell the beach from disconcertingly far away, it was still pretty damn nice-looking. (A few of us would go for a swim later in the week, just to say we did it. I couldn’t stay on the beach all week and not check out the water. It was far from clean, but could have been worse.) My host family had been referring to our week of Field Based Training as vacaciones during the preceding days – I had tried to correct them and express that we were actually going to be working every day, but now it seemed like they might have had the right idea all along. Sweet.

In some sense FBT was a kind of vacation, in that it was a break from the daily grind of technical powerpoints and Spanish classes at the training center. But we were in Paracas for a week to go out into the campo and do real work, putting to use some of the skills we’d been learning since Day One. Our first day we packed into a combi and took off for a small community where we would spend the morning interviewing families according to the water/sanitation-specific survey which we’ll be using out in our sites beginning in less than a month. It didn’t take us long to realize that we had entered the worst poverty most of us had ever seen; the town had always been poor, but last year’s earthquake had really amplified things. Like the New Orleans effect, but way worse. Many houses had been rebuilt, but several times as many families had been forced to abandon their collapsed houses, now living in temporary straw huts clustered together in the sand outside the main town. No water, no sewage, no electricity. Amid the questions about water storage, basic sanitation, and waste disposal, one older woman broke down and cried, having met us only a few minutes before. Later, we came across the public latrines that many families had cited in the interviews. They were filthy, and emptied right into a dried-up irrigation canal – I couldn’t decide if it was better for the canal to be dry and therefore at least keeping all the sewage in one place, or full of water (as it would be when it rained) which would carry the waste away, but then dumping it right into the fields where the campesinos grew their corn and beans. One WatSan volunteer will be stationed here starting in less than a month, and suffice it to say he or she will have plenty to keep him or her busy. Which is exactly why we’re here.

In the following days we worked on a series of hands-on projects, including latrine construction with a French-Swiss NGO and wastewater pipe installation with the municipal water company. We spoke with lots of interesting, very knowledgeable people. We used the small UN office near Pisco as our headquarters, and it was cool to talk to the UN folks about the disaster recovery efforts they were heading up. We also visited schools to check out their temporary, post-earthquake bathrooms and spoke with officials about solid waste disposal. That last visit about half of us missed out on, sick in bed with a viscous case of the bicicleta (the generic term for any combination of explosive diarrhea, vomiting, and fever). Not sure what it was that we all ate, but with all the seafood in the standard Paracas menu, maybe it was only a matter of time. (Being right next to the ocean, I did get to finally try ceviche, and it knocked my socks off.) So for many of us, Friday was spent shuffling between bed and the bathroom. At first it was pretty funny to hear what was coming out of your roommate every few minutes, but six or seven hours later the humor wore off. As Preston noted, it’s easy to see how this kills people. We got the tvs working around dinnertime, which improved morale slightly. Grey’s was on, dubbed in Spanish.

By Saturday morning most of us could at least manage to get up out of our rooms, but a few still missed the boat tour of the Islas Ballestas. Just south of our location lies a huge marine nature preserve containing Humboldt penguins, sea lions, and thousands of species of flying birds. Several miles offshore lie the islands where many of these species also spend time (also the islands that used to be covered several meters deep in guano which Peru has exported as super- fertilizer during various periods of its history). Those who went said it was definitely worthwhile, so hopefully I’ll get to return at some point and see the islands. But a boat ride that morning probably would have ended badly for everyone.

All told, FBT was an awesome break from what’s getting to be a monotonous day-to-day schedule at the training center, and raging diarrhea aside it got everyone psyched to get out and do the real thing. This week we’ll be notified of our site placements, and then on Sunday we’ll actually travel to our sites to meet with local officials, meet our host families, and check out our new digs. Which should be enough to effectively distract everyone for the remaining couple weeks of training.