Two days in the life

What´s up everyone- I´m back. No pics yet ´cause facebook doesn´t load on the computers at my site (beggars can´t be choosers), but I should be updating the blog pretty regularly from here on out. Below is the first of many, for your reading pleasure. Enjoy...

10/1/2009

The last two days have been a range of extremes, in several senses of the word. To start off with, I woke up yesterday extremely early (3:30 AM) to wait for my work counterpart Miguel to come by my house with the Health Center truck. He showed up an hour or so later (that’s the thing about la hora peruana, especially in the campo – I like to be on time on the off-chance that someone else is too, but it’s generally a relative concept, and flexible) and we took off downhill in the pre-dawn dark. Along for the ride was Maximo, a técnico from the federal Ministry of Health (called “MINSA,” one of about a thousand acronyms I’m learning) in Piura, who was in Chalaco for a couple days to lead training workshops for the water authorities in the small campo towns or caserios. Note: when I say authorities, I mean the farmers in each town – or sometimes their wives – who volunteer for positions on the village water committee (abbreviated JASS in rural Perú) where they serve in one of five elected positions, or if they know a bit about water (theoretically, that is), as the actual system operator. Anyway, the first workshop, held the day before in Chalaco for the upper part of the district, had been a pretty big success. Of the thirty-five or so JASS invited, about fourteen sent representation, which meant a meeting of about fifty (less than 50% attendance, but a very solid number for any meeting regarding anything around here). I have no doubt that every person in the room was well-aware that a (free) hot lunch was on the menu for later in the day. The meeting lasted a few hours, and as the fleeting morning sun gave way to a rapidly descending fog and then steady rain, Maximo went through a couple very informative powerpoints about water system maintenance, water treatment, and other related themes. How much of it registered (and of that information, how much of it will be put to use) will remain to be seen as I continue to make my rounds of the caserio to meet with the JASS and fill out my door-to-door surveys.

In any case, we were off to Silahuá to conduct the same workshop for the lower part of the district. It’s usually about a two hour drive from Chalaco, but the preferred shortcut was flooded out after torrential rains the previous afternoon (pretty extreme), so we would have to drive the three hours or so down to Morropon and then head another two or three up to Silahuá. It was actually a pretty cool opportunity to pick the brains of two guys who know way more about what I’m trying to do than I do. Not so cool: the fact that I was in the backseat of the cab for the five-hour journey: a tight squeeze for me in any pickup truck, much less this particular one. At least we got to stop in Morropon along the way to stretch and get some food – cow intestines for breakfast: extreme. (They’re actually not that bad…look kinda like rubbery calamari and don’t really taste like anything in particular). Continuing on, we started the climb up to Silahuá. This part of the district is a couple thousand feet lower in elevation than my site, and it’s considerably warmer and looks and feels much more tropical. It struck me as a weird landscape, though. Whereas my area is characterized by misty hills divided into individual land parcels for sugarcane, corn, grains, and vegetables, down near Morropon, rice is the name of the game. The road is lined with banana trees and you feel like there should be a beach just beyond them, but it’s just rice paddies stretching as far as you can see. Weird, I thought, for Peru at least. As you begin to climb back up out of the flatlands, the landscape remains lush at some points, with massive, lime green-barked trees which I hadn’t seen at my higher elevation. But every so-often there’s a long patch of burned-out, depleted-looking land of short, straggly brown shrubs. Combined with the swirling fog it felt like we were entering some kind of weird, dark fairy tale. Anyway, by the time we got to Silahuá we had picked up a couple guys who Miguel knew, as well as several JASS members from assorted towns who were on their way up in the mud. This meant a packed truck bed on a very windy, narrow mountain dirt road which was a soupy mess in the mud, which in turn meant a lot of patinando (“skating/slipping”) for the truck and a lot of breath-holding on my part. The descent after the workshop would prove even more extreme in that regard. But we made it and the workshop proceeded smoothly.

Extreme high point of yesterday: my buddy Patrick, another WatSan volunteer, is living in Silahuá and had a long-awaited late Christmas present in store for me, in the form of a laptop. If you happen to see Casey Emmett wandering the streets of some Western town looking for work anytime soon, give him a big high five for me…maybe even give him ten: the Obama team liked him so much they let him keep his campaign laptop after The Man won big in November, and after hearing of my recent unfortunate loss of all things electronic, Case has temporarily donated it to the cause. (It has since gone on a ridiculous series of domestic and international voyages, changing hands four times over the course of two weeks, and finally arriving in mine yesterday). I had also ordered a new camera, which accompanied the computer all the way from Maine. What this means for y’all: blog entries and pics. What it means for me: about an 800% spike in my entertainment options, in particular after dinner when it’s raining outside and the family is watching Animal Planet (again), cartoons, or one of many telenovelas or Latin soap operas. Don’t get me wrong, I like all three in their time and place, but up to a certain point. Sometimes you just wanna watch or listen to something ‘merican.

After the workshop, around 2PM, we set off in the rain, packed to the gills and sliding all over the place. At one point everyone had to unload and go try to help a big truck that was stuck trying to get around a steep, uphill hairpin turn. Miguel thought it was funny to continue on for a good three or four minutes after he got past, which left most of us running after the truck, ankle deep in mud, trying to grab hold and jump into the bed. By the time we got to Morropon we had ditched all of our extra passengers, and Miguel and I bid goodbye to Maximo, who hopped a bus back to Piura. I bought a couple mangos and we took off for the last leg. It started raining shortly after leaving town, as we talked about everything from the American higher educational system to “wars your country has been in,” and by the time the blacktop changed abruptly to mud and we began the ascent, darkness was falling. Then things got a little interesting. We’d been having some car issues all day; on the descent we had to stop a couple times and dry out the connections on the distribuidor (don’t know enough about cars to translate that, but it has something to do with the electrical connection between the engine block and the rest of the car). The gas pump had also been acting up. All of this re-emerged with a vengeance starting at about 6PM in the rain. Balancing over three-foot deep puddles with my flashlight in my mouth, wrapping electrical wires with a plastic bag under the hood and blowing excess gas out of the gas pump with Miguel shouting directions over the rain from inside the cab, I have to say I learned a lot about the inner workings of 12-year old Nissan pickups. Pretty extreme.

Well we got the clunker running after several failed attempts and continued on our way, but just when you could almost smell Chalaco, she died for the last time. This time it didn’t take an expert to see the problem – we were out of gas. By now the passenger bus we had passed a good two hours ago had caught up, and all the passengers got out to help us push the pickup to the side of the road so the bus could pass. Not easy in Vietnam-style mud. We sent word with the bus to tell someone at the Health Center to drive the “ambulance” (another old midsize pickup with a covered box-thing sitting atop the bed) down with some gas. Which left Miguel and I in the rain, in the dark, and suddenly in complete silence, except for the crickets. We walked back to the nearest little town and Miguel bought a couple cigarettes. I ate the banana and the two pieces of bread I’d been hoarding all day. It had now been about an eighteen-hour day, and we were cold, wet, and tired. I was getting a little irritated. But largely thanks to Miguel’s unflappable happy demeanor, it was all good. Another half hour and Jesús arrived with the fuel, and we were good to go. I arrived home around ten, and ate what was left of a dinner of potatoes, cheese, and arroz con leche – a thick pudding-type dish that is exactly what it sounds like: rice and milk – and crashed hard. A long day, with some ups and downs, but all’s well that ends well. Plus I had my computer.

Today proved to hold some extremes, as well, though less to do with weather and Nissans. I slept in past my usual 6:30 wakeup, and around 10AM headed out on a by now well-know path to the caserio of El Palmo, about an hour’s hike. I’m trying to survey at least 25% of the populations of these towns, and as most have between forty and fifty households, if I can talk to twelve or fifteen people I’m satisfied, and move on to the next one on the list. This was my second of probably three or four visits to El Palmo. The day was surprisingly clear, which is exceptional for this time of year, and I made it there without one single spectacular wipeout (also exceptional; even with my killer rubber boots which are standard around here in the “winter,” the super-high levels of clay in the mud turn usually simple paths into virtual slip ‘n slides. And the real rains haven’t even started yet, apparently).

Up to this point, my encuestas have been going surprisingly – I’d even say extremely – well. Basically I go door-to-door (which often involves some serious exploring if not bush-whacking) and sit down with whichever adults are around – generally women since it’s corn-planting season and the men are mostly out in the fields working – to ask them a series of questions about the accessibility and quality of their drinking water, their human waste disposal, their trash situation, frequency of illness in the house (particularly parasites and chronic diarrhea), and a few other general health questions. It’s funny how some questions really hold people up (“How many people live here” is often not nearly as straightforward a question as it seems), and others that would seem uncomfortable (“Where do you and your children, uh, relieve yourselves?”) are breezed right through (“In the campo, wherever we want. Next?”). Depending on the person, the surveys can take anywhere from about ten minutes when they don’t invite you past the bamboo fence gate and speak mostly in monosyllables, to over half an hour when they are obviously thrilled and intrigued by this giant white kid with his boots and NGO-style work vest and folder full of papers. I haven’t been invited to more than a couple meals thus far, but when that happens you accept no matter how full you think you are. In any case, thus far I’ve covered three of the ten or twelve closest caserios to Chalaco, and the families have been overwhelmingly friendly and helpful.

Today was a little different. I struck out early on at a couple houses where neither parent was home, and had to hike for a while through some fields and then down a path I hadn’t yet explored until I found the next house. So this older woman comes around from the back of the adobe house after a few loud whistles and “Alo’s” on my part, and I go into my normal “Hi my name’s Mateo, I’m a volunteer with the Cuerpo de Paz living in Chalaco and making my rounds in the caserios to talk to families about their water situation so I can figure out where I might be able to start some projects, etc. etc.” She’s a little wary, and I think slightly deaf, but things aren’t all that out of the ordinary. She’s one of those who doesn’t invite you to sit down or even to enter the general area of the house, so we’re standing there talking across the low fence about her outdoor tap when the señor of the house walks up from the field below. At first he seems interested in who I am and what I’m doing, but then it becomes abruptly clear that I’m unwanted. His diatribe went something like this: “Water?? You wanna know about water?? There it is (points to the tap) – it’s right there! What the hell else do you want?? That’s all we have!! No one gives us anything, we get nothing!! Nothing! And what the (expletive) are you? A miner?? You (expletive) miners are always coming around here and doing nothing but (expletive)-ing us and our land!! You just (expletive) everything!!” Whoa. I tried, in vain, to explain to this old man that I wasn’t, in fact, a miner here to (expletive) the land or him, but that I was an unpaid volunteer living here to provide support, etc., but he wasn’t having it. I left quickly in a flurry of “thank-you’s” and “won’t bother you again’s,” but it took a lot for me not to stick around and figure out just what the hell was going through this old dude’s head. Definitely the right decision, though, both for my own safety and for the sake of my future projects in El Palmo.

A little shaken up and honestly, pissed off, I moved on down the road telling myself I knew this kind of stuff was going to happen, and that I had something like that coming after so many positive responses thus far. All this was going through my head as I approached another house to try again. All the sudden, like a bat out of hell this nasty-looking dog comes tearing around the corner at me, barking and not doing a whole lot of tail-wagging. Now there’s no shortage of dogs around here, and most of them bark. A lot. Running in the morning can be pretty intense that way. Some have come close to biting me, but one little nick in the mouth with your shoe and they back right off. But it’s pretty easy to tell the ones that mean business, and in this case my fight or flight kicked in and the latter won out. I was gone. So two houses down and no dice. It was still early, no worries. Next house. Several men are hanging around, obviously taking a break from working in the field. They invite me in underneath the covered front of the house (most adobe houses in the area have this kind of front-meeting place. Very rarely are you invited inside the actual house, but rather they invite you “in,” head inside for a second, and re-emerge with a woven blanket that they put down for you on the long bench against the front wall of the house. I’d say this happens at 95% of the houses I’ve visited). This case was no different, but I quickly learned that none of these guys – or the señora who emerged from inside after I sat down – actually lived here, but it was a house they shared when they were working together in their fields. One lived somewhere else in El Palmo, and I had started asking him some of the questions, when one of the older men (presumably this guy’s father or uncle or something) interjected and told me that they lived independiente and didn’t get any support from the government, nor did they really want or need any. I pressed him a little and told him that I totally understood, but that I worked with a different organization and my concern was with overall community health and – in a line that was used unsuccessfully a few too many times today – I was here as a volunteer to support with community projects. He looked at me and said simply, “Listen kid, we’re evangelicos. We live alone. We don’t need your help.” Though not entirely clear on what being a non-Catholic Christian had to do with not wanting latrines or potable water, I told them I didn’t want to bother them, and if they didn’t want to speak with me that was fine, but that I wasn’t trying to impose anything on them, yada yada. Then followed a pretty awkward silence which I tried to fill with some of the same – now tired – lines about who I was and why I was here, but nothing. Finally I kind of muttered, “Entonces...me voy?” (basically, “So, should I get lost…or…?”). A few mumbles, a nod and awkward smile or two. So I thanked them and moved along, a little bewildered and contemplating how one would say “when it rains it pours” in Spanish.

Soon, though, my luck swung back to the opposite extreme. I had three or four really successful interviews in a row with super-friendly mothers. A couple of them even shocked me with the response, that “Yes, of course we boil our water before we drink it. To kill the parasites!” Music to my ears, and an answer I hadn’t heard more than once in all my previous visits. The general consensus (as I more or less already knew) was that they really want 1) electricity, and 2) latrines. I told them that electricity might be a little big for me to take on, but I would be working with the municipalidad (local government) and other groups, and they might be able to help farther along the line…but that latrines were right up my alley and I would see what I could do once I finished my diagnostic work. At my last stop (I was out of encuestas, which wasn’t an accident, as I wanted to head home before the afternoon rain started), the señora knew who I was before I even introduced myself, explaining that she was a friend of Beto and Ophelia’s (my host-father Nestor’s brother, and sister-in-law, who live in the house adjoining ours in Chalaco – Beto’s the man. More about him later.) “In fact,” she continued, “Doña Mari (Nestor and Beto’s mother, who lives with Beto) is right down there at the river with the girls!” I had left home with Mari, her granddaughter Yilda, and Angelica, who is Nestor’s daughter from another woman (preceding my host mother Olga). A little unclear on that whole situation, but I’m sure I’ll find out if I stick around long enough. His son Nestor, from the same woman, is also visiting during the vacaciones (kinda funny that Nestor has named one son from each woman after himself…guess there’s no question about who the father is). Anyway, turns out the three of them had a destination (the Rio Claro) much closer to mine than I had realized. After finishing the survey (the family had its own well-maintained compost system, another first), I took off down the trail to the river and soon met up with the family. They had come to move Beto’s cattle (around here they keep the cows, and sometimes horses, tethered to stakes, which they move around every few days as the animals eat themselves out of pasto or grass), and also to milk them and make fresh cheese. Though they had already milked, I helped mudar (move) the cows, and then watched the process for making the cheese which I eat almost every day as my one single calcium source. Pretty simple, they just mix the milk with an unknown substance (though I think it’s somehow derived from pig fat and lime juice) which separates the milk into a watery liquid and a more solid, curdled-looking substance. They pack the solid stuff like you might pack a snowball, squeezing as much liquid as possible out of it, and then let it sit for a while. And boom, cheese. We ate some of it, along with camote (sweet potato, which I’m starting to much prefer to the standard, non-sweet variety) and bread which they had brought along. The whole scene, with the cows grazing, the stream bubbling along, and the fog starting to descend, had a kind of surreal, peaceful, almost poetic feel to it. Really, pretty cool. And a nice end to what started as a pretty shitty morning.

We arrived home an hour or so later in the rain, and – another high point – I heard that my desk was done. My buddy Walter the carpenter – who, like most people, is also a relative (a brother-in-law I think…in fact as of New Year’s Eve I’m the godfather of the new house he’s building for his sister-in-law and family…that’s another story) – has been building me a custom desk and chair for my room since about the first week I got to site. He’s a great guy, and hilarious; the fact that the finish date was extended several times over the course of two or three weeks really has nothing to do with him or any lack of professionalism, it’s just part of the drill around here. Anyway I headed up to his workshop off the plaza in the middle of town, and he brought out the desk and chair. I kid you not, this furniture is friggin’ beautiful. I had no idea it would come out as nicely as it did. Easily the nicest piece of furniture I’ve seen in Chalaco, and he did it for 140 soles, or about 45 bucks. I mean, I’ve spent more than that on a big night at the bar. Carrying them home in the rain, I was surprised at how heavy each piece was, and he told me they’re made from a wood they bring in from the selva – or jungle – of Jaen, on the other side of the Andes ridge, because it’s cheaper and stronger than what’s around here. Not sure where that puts me in relation to deforestation of the Amazon, but Walter’s word is good enough for me. Long story short, I’ve got a beautiful new – extra tall – desk and chair in my room (with a shiny new laptop sitting on top). Ironic that the first time I’ve ever really fit comfortably under a desk comes in a country where I’m a good head taller than almost everyone.

And so end two days in the life of Mateo, Rural Development Worker. Tomorrow, rinse and repeat.