Piura

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22/1/2009

Piura’s a cool spot. The regional capital that all of us in the departments of Piura and Tumbes (around 40 volunteers) report to for monthly meetings, it’s also where we pick up our mail, eat cheeseburgers, pizza, and other key items absent from our regular diets (like vegetables), and trade stories both for their entertainment value and also to learn from each-others’ experiences at site, both the good and the bad. Piura is generally dismissed by guidebooks as offering little in the way of history, culture, vistas, or entertainment, but its combination of big-city amenities and laid-back, lazy atmosphere provides a pretty ideal place for us as volunteers to unwind and stock up.

As far as climate goes, there’s a drastic, dramatic change from Chalaco to Piura. It’s a weird feeling, sort of surreal, to go down there after a month at site – where I pretty much live in a cloud if not a constant, steady rain – and wake up after a late-night bus ride to the sun beating down on you, already sweating in the sweltering heat. Technically it’s “summer” in all parts of the southern hemisphere right now, even though up in the sierra we call the rainy season el invierno, or the "winter." But there’s no mistaking what season it is down in Piura. A comparatively quiet town of about 500,000 situated smack in the middle of the country’s northern desert region, Piura’s about an hour inland from the Pacific Ocean. And it’s very, very hot.

Aside from the food options in Piura and the wireless internet, hot water, cable TV, and other benefits of our go-to hostel (not to mention what has to be the most extensive volunteer-created library the world has ever seen), one of the coolest things about going down to Piura is the people we hang out with. We’ve got a solid crew of volunteers up here in Piura/Tumbes, and there are a lot of real chill people both from my group (Peru 12) as well as earlier groups (Peru 9, 10, and 11) in the region. We’re from all over the country – most in our early-to-late twenties but with a few exceptions, with all kinds of different life stories, college majors, interests, projects areas, and more. But we also hang out with non-Peace Corps folks, who make up the really interesting crowd.

Last night, for example, a bunch of us were sitting around at our regular outdoor bar/restaurant called “La Habana” – situated right in the middle of an awesome little burger joint (they make one with guacamole and Doritos right in the sandwich called “La Mexicana” that will knock your socks off...seriously, don’t wear socks), a restaurant with pretty decent pizza by Peruvian pizza standards (which aren’t high), and a really good Peruvian-version Chinese place (called “Chifa”). Anyway we were all sitting around having some beers, and at one point I looked around the table and realized just how eclectic a crowd it really was. Four of us were volunteers from different parts of the States, working in different program areas (from water systems to coffee-growers unions to HIV/AIDS to youth development) and in different parts of the department of Piura. To my right was a Peruvian dude from Lima who was studying in Piura for the time being, but was soon headed to Germany to meet up with his long-time girlfriend who he had met a couple years ago when she was volunteering in Cuzco, down in the southern sierra of the country – Inca country. He was particularly interested in baseball and (American) football, and especially how they differed from cricket and rugby, respectively. Couldn’t shed a whole lot of light on the comparisons, but I was doing my best. To my left was a Dutch biologist (and the only person taller than me who I’ve met here) who had grown up in Luxembourg, continued his education back in Holland, and is now in Piura for six months doing field work for his masters thesis, on the effects of local bird guano accumulation on the growth rates of two different coastal tree species. The guy speaks near-perfect English, as well as Spanish and French, and has an incredibly wide body of knowledge of all sorts of other, non-tree stuff. Really interesting dude to talk to. Continuing on around the table: next to him were three girls a couple years younger than me: one from Switzerland who is here for a year volunteering with a health program for mothers and children, the second from Belgium working with the same program, and the third from Norway who’s here, like the Dutch guy, doing masters work, in her case a human geography study of the benefits of labor association membership on the productivity of mango farmers on the country’s north coast. She also speaks fluent Spanish and English, and probably several European languages, too, if she’s anything like the others at the table. Pretty awesome. Others at the table included a Peruvian guy about my age who had spent several years studying in London and therefore speaks perfect English, but with a thick, thick British accent, and another Peruvian, a geologist who works for a mining company operating in the upland regions of Piura and other nearby regions, specifically in gold-extraction for eventual exportation (I immediately thought of all the “No to mining, Yes to agriculture” slogans painted all over Chalaco’s homes and walls.) This must have been the miner I was confused with by a disgruntled campesino last week outside of Chalaco.

Conversations around the table ranged from sports, to language, to “How you hit on chicks in your culture,” to Obama and the fate of the US, to the word for “Cheers” in different languages, and beyond. The crazy thing is you totally take it for granted that all these people from all over the world just happen to be here sitting around together, drinking the same lukewarm Peruvian beers and shooting the breeze in several different languages. Maybe it’s being a foreigner myself that made it all seem oddly normal. But there’s no doubt it’s the kind of thing you look back on a few years later and think, “Damn, that was very, very cool.” For whatever reason, that notion struck me as the place was closing down around midnight, and I’m glad it did.