mama huevos

The last couple months of my life have been…interesting, and I use that word in two very different sentiments. First and foremost, I mean it in the most sarcastic way possible, in the way that it is used euphemistically for “frustrating,” “defeating,” “frantic,” and sometimes flat-out depressing. This bathroom project has been a case study in all the little nuances that make working in a developing country such an adventure. In the States, once funding was secured, you could presumably go ahead with a project as long as other factors were in place, such as materials transport, labor, and the like. The difference is that most of those factors you would have control over, assuming like I said, there was sufficient funding. Here, everything – everything – depends on factors usually outside of my control, which is problematic.
It starts with the weather; although the rainy season ended in May, the damage it did to the dirt mountain roads still dictates what I can (and more often, cannot) do in terms of materials transport up to the site. Furthermore, this summer we´ve gotten a few random heavy rains, which has only worsened the state of the road and also ruined many batches of adobe bricks that the families are preparing for the walls of their individual units. Related to the weather is the yearly crop cycle, which means that even if I get all the materials to site this month, we probably can´t start building until September when the wheat harvest ends and the local men have a few months to work before planting corn in December. Then you have the local authorities, who I am finding to be increasingly corrupt, inefficient, incapable, lazy, and altogether much more interested in their campaign – this being an election year – than following through on agreements we signed in February. Related to the people themselves is their apparently WWII-era machinery, which is in a constant state of disrepair, from the bulldozer used to clean up the road, to the dump truck used for bringing brick and cement up the mountain, to even the pickup trucks and dirt bikes used for getting around. Finally, materials prices and US-Peru exchange rates change every week, and even the logistics of withdrawing from a US account and depositing in my local account for accessibility purposes has taken up days of time, with me frantically running around Piura between various ATMs, the bank, and the materials distributor, and learning a lot of things the hard way.

I don´t mean to whine, nor were any of these factors completely unanticipated. But they´re worth mentioning.

The other meaning of “interesting,” though, is much more…well, interesting. In this sense I mean it literally, synonymous with “intriguing,” “fascinating,” and the like. The reason is the new cast of characters who have come into my life since beginning the project, from truck drivers to salesmen to local health workers. Overall I´ve found these people to be much more helpful and willing to work than most of the people I´ve worked with in the past year and a half, which I attribute 100% to the fact that they´re getting paid to do their jobs, rather than just taking time out of their days to work with me. Below are some of the highlights.

Lucho is one of the largest and jolliest people in Chalaco, and as of last year, also happens to drive the largest truck in town, a giant 15-ton Mitsubishi that looks like a huge refrigerator laid on its side. After months of waiting and pleading for the municipality to clean up the road straight to Naranjo from Piura, I saw him unloading a truck-full of bricks one day in Chalaco, and realized that if I could get the municipality to outsource the job to him, we could bring everything up to Chalaco and then figure out the rest. I couldn´t believe I hadn´t thought of this earlier, but with so many things to think about, I just hadn´t. It also had not been suggested to me by anybody who lives here and knows about these matters, which would have been nice. In any case, we worked it out with the municipality – which proved shockingly cooperative in this particular moment – and got things moving. I have since made three trips down the mountain with Lucho to a spot called Buenos Aires, where the best bricks around are made. In what is almost a full twelve hours of travel, we drive down, purchase and load the 3,500 bricks that his truck can hold, then drive back up and unload them, either into temporary “storage” in an open pile right in the plaza, or directly onto a smaller truck that can handle the trip to Naranjo. Lucho is one the kindest, funniest people I know, constantly cackling “tee-hee-hee” giggles even when no one else really understands why, his Santa Claus belly shaking and undulating with his laughs and the bumps in the road. He´s got a great sense of humor, sarcastic, which is rare here. One of his favorite things to say to me is, “Mateo, estamos en Perú!” Which is a good-natured excuse for anything and everything that impedes our progress, from popped tires in the middle of nowhere, to day-long waits for people to show up, to his CD player being jacked out of his locked truck during less than two minutes of distraction. Like all truck drivers, Lucho comes with his ayudante or helper, a local teen who has the worst breath in the world, but otherwise makes a good companion.

Emilio drives the smaller truck that does the Chalaco-Naranjo leg, and thus represents the second piece of the journey. He´s shorter and smaller in stature, but also has a nice gut, and is a big fan of the Peruvian pull-your-shirt-up-over-your-gut-and-rub-it-thoughtfully-move. He´s soft-spoken but also sarcastic, and I am infinitely grateful to both he and Lucho for their surprising work ethic and punctuality. Technically Emilio lives in Piura, where I found out he drives a cab, but he makes better money driving his truck up in the mountains, mostly working as hired transport for the Chalaco municipality. I´m pretty sure he doesn´t actually have a house in Chalaco, because most early mornings when we plan to load bricks, I find him sleeping in the cab of his truck. Speaking of which, I should probably clarify my punctuality comment; Lucho is very punctual, which is exceedingly rare in a country where 6AM can mean anywhere from 8AM onwards, and maybe not at all. Emilio is generally pretty good about it too, but I did get pretty fed up with him one day when I was up before dawn waiting for him and finally found him around 9AM, at which point he explained that he had been up all night, sick with a stomach bug. By this point not a stranger to such excuses, I assumed right away that he had just been boozing all night and was too hung-over to work. But later on I saw him coming out of a thicket toward his truck, buttoning up his pants and wincing in pain, which confirmed that he was actually probably telling the truth. (This also confirmed my theory that he lacks a home base in Chalaco). Emilio, like Lucho, has his hired helpers, made up of a three-man crew of Chalaco kids in their mid-teens. Two of them are scrawny brothers a year or two apart who are supposed to be enrolled in my night-time English class, but only came once that I can recall, and the other is a younger guy they call “Motor” for reasons still unknown to me. Like most kids here, they started out pretty shy around me, but after having worked together on-and-off for a few weeks, they´re warming up. All three are decent workers, and a pretty funny crew, constantly on each-others´ cases. Somehow, Motor ends up being the authority on everything, despite his size and age disadvantage, which probably has to do with his impressive command of swear words and the audacity to act like he knows what he´s talking about all the time, even when he obviously doesn´t. No one else does either, and he´s louder, so he wins. Emilio calls these kids “máma huevos,” not a particularly endearing name, but pretty creative as far as derogatory nicknames go, in that it combines parts of both the male and female anatomy. But he uses it in a tough-love kind of way, always laughing along with his little minions. In an amazing display of agility, Emilio has perfected the art of swinging around on the bars that span his truckbed while everyone else works, kicking them playfully in the butt and grabbing them with his legs like a pudgy Jackie Chan. I´m not sure where the energy for these random outbursts comes from, but as long as they´re happy and working, I´m not asking any questions. One time in the late afternoon the kids yelled down to us from the back of the truck, asking what time it was, and instead of responding, he just smirked – “What, like they have plans or something?” We both laughed. Like I said, sarcasm is a rare trait among Peruvians, and one that I much appreciate.

Mere is the head nurse technician at the Health Ministry post in Naranjo, and has proved an enthusiastic ally. He´s been there to help from the first days in January when I was meeting with community members about the idea of the project, and I think he will be an important part of the long-term monitoring and maintenance of the bathrooms after I´m gone. He´s a skinny little guy of few words, and in the face actually looks a lot like my dad, which is odd. Mere (short for Heremenegildo or something) always seems preoccupied with something more important than what´s going on, and he holds on way too long when he shakes your hand, but otherwise is a very solid guy, very responsible. He sports a University of Michigan sweatshirt, which I never let him hear the end of. His response: “Michi-gan, Michi-gon, Michi-whatever as long as it keeps me warm!” Fair enough.

Manrique is an absolute piece of work. He´s the guy I´ve been buying brick from down in Buenos Aires, and one of the most outrageous and lewdest people I´ve run into in all my adventures here. The first time we met, Lucho and I had to drive around asking for his house and then wait an hour or so for him to show up. He walked in, hair slicked back, slightly-tinted glasses, white undershirt tucked into black slacks, and sporting a thin little white-haired tickler under his lower lip that I mistook for a dab of spit for a good hour or so. If there was ever a prototype of the sleazy Latin businessman, this was it. He immediately began referring to me as “Gringo,” a name which always makes me bristle a little, but which is usually dropped once people learn that I have a real name. Not the case here. Once we arrived at the brick “yard” (just a hole in the sand with bricks piled up all around and a few stray donkeys), it didn´t take long for him to start with the sex jokes, the punch lines of which he always seems to divulge a few seconds too early, thus ruining what would otherwise be marginally funny, if not completely obscene jokes. The subjects range from Peruvian men and women, to Gringos (height and associated “size” being his favorite topic), to the ubiquitous burras (female donkeys, he proudly explained to me, are “A Peruvian boy´s first love!”) True story. He´s turned out to be just the sort of businessman I took him for, one day chiding the corrupt nature of his country, and the next trying to swindle ten soles from me, and then laughing it off when I called him out. He´s the kind of guy you might actually enjoy having (one) beer with, and then would make sure to check all your pockets…twice. He´s full of the typical rural Peruvian wisdom, and has been so kind as to advise me on a great number of matters during the time we´ve spent together waiting while his workers load bricks; my favorite was his assertion that my yanqui sandals made from old tires would give me liver problems, justifying it because “tires last forever!” Right. He´s also frequently reminding Lucho of his size, which isn´t as weird here as it would be in the States, since we´re talking about a country where nicknames basically are the Spanish equivalent of taking a person´s most obvious feature and adding “-y” (fatty, blacky, Chinese-looking guy, blondie, etc.) But Manrique is much more in-your-face about it than most, and Lucho has enough class to be above that kind of stuff, so it creates sort-of an uncomfortable situation, and I feel bad for my pal Lucho. At one point, driving away from the pit, Lucho muttered: “That bastard probably never even graduated from grade school.” Which may well be true. In the end Manrique is harmless, and all the brick has been of solid quality at bought a fair price. But I don´t exactly find myself regretting the fact that he´s several hours down the mountain from me. I can reach him when I need to, and that´s plenty close for me.

The people at Fifth-Third Bank have been very helpful on the few occasions that we´ve spoken, as I´ve tried to navigate the process of transferring project funds out of my US account and into my Peruvian account at Banco de la Nación. This has presented a number of interesting details, among them the withdrawal limits at foreign ATMs. To my great surprise, I was able to call the help line (on Skype) at 8AM on a Saturday and an hour later they had lifted my limit for the weekend to accommodate my needs. At one point the lady was having trouble understanding why I couldn´t just use my card to buy the building materials, and I gave her an abridged version of the description above to convince her that I wasn´t in Kansas anymore. I guess it worked. My experience on the Peruvian end hasn´t been quite as smooth; I´ve encountered hours-long lines at the bank only to be told I´m in the wrong one, received various and conflicting responses from one teller to the next about the feasibility and costs of international funds transfers, random closing times, unexpected currency conversion fees, and more. In order to buy my first batch of construction materials, I found out that, although the hardware distributor takes credit cards, there´s a 5% service charge, and my remaining options were to pay in cash or actually go to the bank and just transfer money straight into their account from mine. Which seemed ridiculous to me, but it worked, and I was spared having to travel around Piura in a moto-taxi with several thousand soles in my pocket. Little victories.

In the end, things are moving along, albeit slowly. We´ve got almost all the brick out to the site, and have made countless trips up from the river where each family has set aside their sand requirement of 30 buckets (no sand in Naranjo, go figure). I´m currently waiting on the Piura regional government to come through on their contribution of the bulk of the cement, ribar, and sheet metal needed, and once that´s bought and transported, we can break ground. As odd as it sounds, I think the actual building of these things might turn out to be the easiest and quickest part of the whole project.