pues, es diferente pe

Hello again sportsfans, long time no blog. I’d like to offer a better excuse, but the truth is I’ve honestly just been completely, frantically busy for the past month or two. Since Christmas, I have: said goodbyes way too quickly in Chalaco; packed up and moved south to Pisco; worked there for a month and started to plan a solid waste management project with the municipality in my district; visited almost all 26 of the volunteers we have in the region, from Cañete to Nazca – a 300km stretch along the Panamerican highway; decided that Pisco wasn’t where I needed to be in order to be an effective and efficient Volunteer Leader; thusly moved to Ica, the regional capital an hour down the road; bought a bike and learned to navigate a new city full of crazy mototaxi drivers; found an interesting organization to work with twice a week; schmoozed with lots of important Peace Corps and host country officials at the US Ambassador’s house in Lima; appeared on local news channels three times in a week, promoting the PC worldwide 50th anniversary; and found, settled into, and furnished a small apartment from the ground on up. Most of that time I have been sweating profusely. I have gone through at least one bottle of sunscreen already. I have eaten grapes for the first time in over two years. I bought a fan, and it changed my life. I broke out my mosquito net for the first time ever, also a game-changer. I have re-learned how to squeeze myself into combis. I have eaten well over a hundred sandwiches made with avocado, cheese, and/or tuna. I bought a grill made out of an old computer, and grilled sausages bought at a supermarket that is half-Target, half-upscale suburban grocery megaplex. In fact, I live in the suburbs, with towering sand dunes on all sides. The place I’ve landed is about as different from where I spent the last two years as I could possibly imagine being in the same country. It’s hot. It’s a city. There are black people. People speak differently. People eat different things. The bread is different. The water is different. People grow different things. Things are called by different names. I do different things. It’s exciting, a little nerve-racking, and more than anything, just different. Get ready for a long one.

Where to begin…well, first I landed in Pisco, a few hours down the coast from Lima. It’s a port town, a dirty and fairly dangerous town, and was also the epicenter of the 2007 earthquake (which, apart from the destruction, didn’t help the already chaotic streets). Almost four years later, the earthquake still pervades everyday life. Everything big that has happened or is happening or is going to happen in Pisco is relative to the terremoto. It’s like time started over when the quake happened. Like Jesus. In Pisco you still see the destruction everywhere you look, but I will say that the town has come a long way since I saw it in 2008. Anyway, I lived in a district outside the city called Tupac Amaru (badass name, eh?). The town was a nice enough place, and captured perfectly what I consider the most significant difference in Peace Corps life from the sierra to here on the coast: by and large, life here is much more comfortable. I don’t mean to say one is better or more authentic than the other. Really, I don’t. But volunteers on the coast just have so much more at their disposal than those up in the mountains who come down to civilization once a month. Internet, restaurants, and more than anything, other volunteers. But what’s interesting is that the people living in these communities generally suffer from the same illnesses and lack the same basic services as those in tiny mountain villages, hours from the nearest highway. More than a few volunteers actually live right on the Panamerican highway. So while I had to deal with inconveniences like mudslides and the cow getting loose, they deal with dust devils and all night traffic and sketchy highway people outside their door.

Pisco is where I thought I was going to be for my third year of service, but soon realized that in order to effectively support our volunteers in the field, I needed to be in Ica. There were definite work possibilities in TA (in my new role I’m supposed to spend some 40% of my time with a partner organization, apart from my responsibilities to the volunteers in the region), and fortunately a fellow volunteer who needed a new site was able to come in and take over. The biggest wat-san need there was definitely a solid waste management plan – what really struck me (and this is also characteristic of most of the places I’ve seen down here) was that the potable water and basic sanitation coverage is excellent (somewhere around 90% of the population has access to both in the town in question), while the waste management is absolutely appalling by comparison (they drive around in a dump truck collecting trash, and then dump it all behind the big sand dune where it is then picked through by poor families – kids and all – and intermittently burned). Coming from the mountains with abundant spring water all around, I had sort-of assumed that the water situation here would be pretty dire (Ica is, after all, one of the driest places on earth in terms of annual precipitation). But overall I’ve encountered excellent water services, including chlorine treatment, which has been a real surprise. Of course, this belies the giant elephant in the room, which is that the Ica aquifer, as a direct result of the booming agro-export business here, is being depleted at a rate rivaling the world’s fastest. There are fundos, giant export farms, that they say use as much water in a day as the city of Ica. Some estimates say that within ten years life here will be drastically different because there simply will be no more groundwater (read more at
http://www.progressio.org.uk/sites/default/files/Drop-by-drop_Progressio_Sept-2010.pdf). So, if you live in the northern latitudes and enjoy asparagus and artichokes in February, maybe think twice next time at the supermarket.

Speaking of the agro business, you should see what they are able to coax out of the ground here in the middle of the desert: pretty much everything. Seriously, almost every kind of fruit I can think of is produced here (including some new ones), along with corn and other staple crops. One of the crazier ones is cochinilla, which is a tiny purple-ish bug that is harvested and crushed to make a dye. The thing is, it only lives on tuna cactus plants. So you have these massive fields of shrub-like cactus plants with giant ping-pong paddle arms that are only grown so that the little bugs can have somewhere to live, and then be removed from. But farmers who do well with it just haul in the dough on the stuff. And cactus is obviously easier to grow in the desert than, say, artichokes. There are towns for which garbanzo beans are so important that they are included in their district coat of arms and slogans. Fruit fly eradication seems to be the biggest social message around, along with HIV prevention (more to come on that), although I still don’t quite understand what fruit flies really do that is so bad. It’s big grape country, and I’ve been gaining a taste for pisco – I know of few liquors that are so smooth when they’re good, and burn so hard when they’re bad. But good pisco is really, really good. And like good tequila, that stuff is not for mixing into a yellowish sugary drink, it is for sipping. That said, nothing against Pisco Sours. They’re delicious, as are Chilcanos – pisco, Ginger Ale, and lime. But they tend to go down like lemonade…and then you can’t remember the rest of the night.

Lots of other new things. Let’s talk about mototaxis. People on the coast don’t walk anywhere, they pay a sol or two and take a little dirtbike-powered tricycle. Very weird to get used to when in Chalaco, I and everyone else would walk several hours a day to get from point A to point B in the green hills. Sometimes I’ll tell someone I’m walking to such-and-such a place, and they give me a look like I’m abso-friggin-lutely out of my gourd, like I just said I’m actually a woman, or something. The place might be literally 10 minutes away. Another quirk: watering the dirt. People in the States water their lawns. People in Ica water their dirt. Seriously, it’s like they’re watering plants or something in front of their houses, but there are never any plants. Just dirt. I guess it’s supposed to keep the dust down, but what it really does is waste a shit-ton of water. It’s one of those things whose absurdity is only compounded by the fact that virtually everyone does it, and therefore would be pretty much impossible to ever stop. Then again, there are smart people who argue that watering your lawn is just as ridiculous and unsustainable. And they are not incorrect. But think how you would respond to a massive “Don’t Take Care of Your Lawn” campaign.

People here generally speak faster and mumble more than up north. That makes for even more difficult community integration for a lot of volunteers. As expected, there is a whole slew of jerga or slang that varies from region to region, and I’m picking up a bit of southern-talk. A buddy of mine would no longer be my cumpa, but my causa or brother. And the token add-on that makes everything more complicated is not the di or diga of the north, but pues. Formally, pues means “well,” as in, “Well, let’s go to the park,” but here it is added on to just about every other word, and often shortened to just pe. "Vamos, pe!" for example. The music is pretty much the same all up and down the coast, cheesy wannabe latin hip-hop reggaeton and only slightly more tolerable cumbia dominating the airwaves. What is totally new to me is the Afro-Peruvian culture, which is not widespread but pretty much limited to a few pockets, like Chincha to the north. The music and dancing really stands out from everything else here; I hope to have more to report on this, because it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than anything else I’ve seen in a while.

As for food, the traditional dish here is carapulcra con sopa seca, a potato-based, spicy, smoky-flavored chicken stew served alongside noodles in a green basil and cilantro sauce. It’s good when done well, but nothing to write home about. As in anywhere, there are some more eccentric dishes, like patita con maní, patita being cow hoof boiled to the point of creating a gelatinous substance that you can cut into pieces, but then turns to sticky goo in your mouth. Maní is peanut, which I’m generally a big fan of, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re eating cow hoof jelly. Then again, mondonguito AKA cau-cau I do like, which is cow intestine chopped up over rice with peas and carrots. I would say I’m one of the few volunteers I know who genuinely likes it, although it has to be cooked just right so that it’s not too chewy. I do miss heavy, starchy sierra food like fried dough tortillas with fresh cheese, and also the ceviche and other amazing seafood on the north coast. But Ica city does have a pollería on practically every corner, where you can get a giant plate of ¼ baked chicken, fries and a salad for about 2 bucks. So things could be worse.

Socio-economically it’s a dynamic and perplexing place. The department of Ica is something like second in the country behind Lima in HIV incidence, and it could really explode in the coming years if the spread isn’t slowed. I couldn’t tell you what the rates are at the moment or how the prevention campaign is going on a macro scale, but virtually all volunteers down here work on HIV projects at some point in their two years, most through US government PEPFAR small grants. I heard an interesting perspective the other day from a local who seems to know his stuff: part of the reason the rates are so high here is that the explosion of mining in the mountains inland from Ica has created all this extra cash that people never had before. Perú is improving drastically in terms of women’s rights and gender roles and expectations, but it remains a machista culture, which includes high rates of infidelity. So if all the sudden you can pay for sex with someone who probably won’t run into your wife at the store, you just might do exactly that. And with the prostitution comes HIV. How much of it is due to this is certainly debatable, but it’s a compelling argument that underlines the nuances and complexities of life here. In that sense, I find myself commiserating with the sierra folk who immigrate to the coast (of whom there are a lot in Ica) and find themselves totally confused and overwhelmed by life here. I’ve found that I trust people way too much, which is logical in a little sierra town, but the city is a different animal. I keep buying fresh cheese and forgetting that I can’t just leave it out and have it not go bad like you can in the colder mountain climate. I was sick for a week because of that.

Back to the mining issue, the extractive industry is the main reason Peru boasts one of the highest growth rates in the region, and in few places is the contrast between the haves and have-nots starker than Asia, the all-consuming beachside behemoth conglomeration of summer homes, resorts, and shopping malls some 80km south of Lima. It’s like the Hamptons of Lima, completely over the top. So people are generally surprised to hear that we have three volunteers working right in the district of Asia. But all you have to do is cross the highway and walk for a few minutes and you’re in a very different world, where needs like basic sanitation remain unmet. It’s really amazing to not just talk vaguely about the “two Perus,” but actually find yourself in a place where the people who need the most can be found within spitting distance of the most profligate flaunters of new wealth in the whole country. Where shiny new imported SUVs spray dust on donkey carts and plywood houses. The gap is so shockingly extreme that you really need to be there to get a sense of it. Asia will continue to perplex and mesmerize me.

As for the mining itself, ironically it is a much presence here than it was up north, where I was frequently mistaken – and chided – for being a maldito minero. I’m working a couple days a week with GIZ, the German government Technical Cooperation group (part of what is like Germany’s USAID), helping construct eco-bathrooms like the ones I built in Chalaco in a town where GIZ is building seismic-resistant housing. The town is in the foothills leading up to the sierra central departments of Huancavelica and Ayacucho, where the country’s big mining operations are located. Every day giant trucks come through the town on the way to or from the mines, carrying copper or gold or zinc, or dozens of workers in hardhats. Having been fairly isolated for two years, it’s exciting for me suddenly to have landed in the place where all the action is in terms of Peru’s economic growth – the agro-export business, the mining, the consumer spending – and to be starting to understand the ways it all affects the locals here: the miners leaving their families to head up into the foreboding mountains, the farm laborers with old t-shirts wrapped around their heads and necks spraying insecticide all day in fields along the Panamerican, the indigenous beggers dressed for the mountains and looking so out of place at the beach, the ubiquitous shoeless kids waving Chiclets at restaurant-goers. Where I lived before, everyone was poor, but it wasn’t this urban brand of poverty where people are reduced to total wretchedness. It is so much more heartbreaking to see, and so much more overwhelming to try to do something about.

But then you have the issue of giving too much. There’s a word in Peruvian Spanish that I don’t think exists in English, asistencialismo. It means, roughly, “the gimme-gimme syndrome.” This happens when you take a poor place, throw a natural disaster or major civil unrest into the equation, and watch as the aid groups trickle in, set up shop, and generally end up giving people a whole bunch of stuff without asking much, if anything, of them. When this happens over years and decades (as it has in many communities around here, in response to landslides and crop under-productivity caused by El Niño, and then the 2007 earthquake), the people come to expect this kind of no-strings-attached support, and anything less becomes unacceptable. This inter-NGO competition and gift-giving is a major challenge for lots of the volunteers in the whole region here, and is something I never even had to consider up in Chalaco. Day-to-day life may be more comfortable as a volunteer on the coast, but in terms of work I had it pretty good up in the hills.

This is getting more than a little wordy, so I’ll cut it off here. Overall, I’m having a blast in my new role and new spot, especially getting out and visiting volunteers in the field and helping get projects started up and sustained. It’s a really solid group here, working on everything from improved cook stoves to water system expansions to solar energy pilot projects, and every day brings something new for me. The experience with GIZ has been great so far, and interesting to get more of the NGO-style approach to development, having only known the Peace Corps grassroots perspective until now. Plus I get to roll around in their air-conditioned Land Cruisers. Ica is haaaaahhhtt but it’s a cool town with the beach a couple hours away, and a good amount of tourists come through on their way to see the Nazca lines or to the nearby Huacachina oasis town. I live essentially in my own place, I cook for myself, I have a wireless connection, and I come and go as I please. I eat yogurt for breakfast. It’s pretty cushy Peace Corps living (Peace Corps Light, as some have called it), and it’s hard not to feel almost guilty about it sometimes. But it’s giving me the opportunity to do something different and support our work in a new – and important, I hope – way.

Lots going on in the next month, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading and I hope everyone is well Stateside and elsewhere. Buy local asparagus!

PS – link to the right to facebook pics from my new digs – “the dirty south”