Planes Trains and Automobiles

The mean city streets of Ica.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I’m forbidden to drive cars or motorcycles. For good reason - I wouldn’t survive 10 minutes behind the wheel in Lima or Ica without having a wreck. They drive by a whole different set of rules down here. And by rules I mean there aren’t any - well, there are but I don’t know what they are and when I think I’ve got it figured out, it turns out that I don’t. So how do I get around without driving? Well, I walk a lot and take a whole array of public transport (I say public but it’s nearly all privately owned) which include taxis, collectivos (shared taxis), mototaxis, combis/micros (mini-busses), busses, etc.

According to Hernando Soto in El Otro Sendero (The Other Path), his book discussing Peruvian informal economies, nearly all of the means of transportation started out extra-legally. In other words, they didn’t register their businesses, pay taxes, get licenses to operate, etc. They simply identified a need, staked out routes, payed off cops, and began running their routes all outside of the formal economic system. Soto’s book was written during the 1980’s and things appear to be more formal in the economic sense - vehicles have their insurance stickers, fares and routes are posted, etc. But you get out on the open road… Look Out! It’s every man for himself.

The object seems to go fast, pass the car in front of you, and go even faster. When you’re at a red light, get right up on the bumper of the car in front of you so some jagbag doesn’t cut in front of you but then of course you’re stuck there when the car in front of you breaks down or doesn’t go when the light turns green. Another rule of the road – honk the living sh*t out of your horn even though you’re stuck in traffic and not going anywhere soon. The noise in busy streets in larger cities is maddening. Quick aside – when I arrived in Miami a few weeks ago I had a couple of hours to kill until my flight to Dallas so I went outside to sit in the warm sun for a while. When I got outside there were a ton of cars and busses dropping off, picking up. No noise whatsoever. No horns. No high pitched scream of mototaxis. Just silence. I felt like something was seriously wrong and felt disoriented, like something wasn’t right with the universe.

The age, comfort of the vehicles range from something built in the 70’s that’s being held together with Bondo, firing on two of its eight cylinders, and billowing blue exhaust out the tail pipe to vehicles that are brand new, very clean, and comfortable.

If you’re a pedestrian, you have to walk con ojos en el trasero (eyes out your rear end). You basically have no rights. You’d better look left, right, left, right, and left again before crossing the street because drivers don’t give a F*****CK about you and won’t slow down to let you cross unless they’re about to hit you in which case it’s probably too late. It’s even worse than St. Louis.
As crazy and arbitrary as the public transportation system seems as soon as you first get here, once you figure it out it does make sense and you can get around pretty efficiently and economically. The next couple of posts, I’ll describe the various forms of transportation I use to get from Point A to Point B while hopefully not ending up at Point C which is not somewhere you want to be day or night.

Peace Corps 50th Anniversary

US Ambassador, Peru´s Minister of Foreign Relations, and Peace Corps Chief of Staff addressing the group at the Ministry of Foreign Relations

Ministry of Foreign Relations

Environment APCD, PC Chief of Staff, PC Regional Director for Latin America, me and the Country Director in front of the US Ambassador´s Residence (they didn´t let us take pictures inside)

Fifty years ago this past Tuesday, March 1, President John F. Kennedy signed the Executive Order creating the Peace Corps whose mission was to promote peace, strengthen the bonds between nations, and provide technical assistance to developing nations. During the past 50 years, over 200,000 volunteers have served in over 70 nations world-wide. The Peace Corps came to Peru in the early 1960s and stayed until the early 1970’s when they were unceremoniously booted out by the Velasco dictatorship. The Peace Corps was invited back to Peru in 2002 during Alejandro Toledo’s presidency and has been here ever since. There are now over 200 volunteers serving in Peru along the coast and in the sierra working in the areas of water and sanitation, small business, environment, youth development, and health.

We celebrated Peace Corps’ anniversary here in Peru by throwing a number of receptions in the capital cities of our regions. The main celebration was held in Lima and I was fortunate enough to attend. On Monday, a group of current and former Volunteers, Peace Corps staff, US Embassy staff, Peruvian diplomats and the press attended a reception hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Relations in their offices in the center of Lima. I say offices but the building they occupy is a beautiful two story palace built during the colonial area. Prior to the reception, the Minister of Foreign Relations, US Ambassador and Peace Corps Chief of Staff visiting from Washington gave speeches. The reception was held on the balcony of the second floor overlooking the courtyard where we drank pisco sours, wine and ate tasty finger foods.

The following day, a larger group of Volunteers, who clean up very nicely by the way, went to the US Embassy to hear a state of the Peace Corps discourse given by the Peace Corps Chief of Staff and the Peace Corps Latin America/Pacific Regional Director. We then went to a reception thrown by the US Ambassador to Peru, Rose Likins, at her residence. The Ambassador’s residence is a stunning two story mansion occupying an entire city block. The residence was built in the 1940’s specifically as the US Ambassador’s residence and was crawling with security that night.

We entered the residence, met the Ambassador in the reception line and entered into the main hall. The first thing you see as you enter is a painting of George Washington which, as cheesy as this sounds, made me feel proud to be an American. To the right of the main entryway is a living room with some large comfy couches and a grand piano. Adjacent is a beautiful library with wood paneled walls and leather high back chairs. Out back is a large garden with a small swimming pool. We weren’t able to go upstairs and see the living quarters but I’m sure they were impressive as well.

The Ambassador and Peace Corps Chief of Staff said some nice words and we toasted the 50 years of Peace Corps. Among the invited were former and current Volunteers, staff, Peruvian counterparts, NGOs and Embassy staff. Alejandro Toledo, the ex-president and current presidential candidate also made an appearance.

There were plenty of pisco sours and wine to go around and the Volunteers behaved themselves pretty well in the face of free booze. To the left of the entryway was a beautiful dining room with perhaps the largest dining room table I’ve ever seen laid out with a terrific spread of food which was, of course, attacked (civilly mind you) by the Volunteers.

It was a truly wonderful event and further strengthened my resolve to serve my country as a diplomat (I’ve already passed the Foreign Service Exam and the next challenge is the interview/Oral Assessment in June so send some good thoughts my direction)

I do actually do some work down here

Winner of the bulletin board contest

Obstetriz, student health promoters and me

Pasacalle through my town (I live a block from here)

Looking back on some of my entries, it looks like I'm just down here in Peru "hueveando" (f*#&ing off) and having a good time. But I am actually doing some work as well. Right before the Christmas/New Years holidays, I worked on an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign affectionately known as PEPFAR. PEPFAR is a fund created during the not-so-smart Bush administration to promote HIV/AIDS awareness and improve AIDS treatment world wide. The thought being that a serious problem in other parts of the world would in turn become a serious problem for the US, even though it already is. Per PEPFAR, HIV/AIDS prevention should focus on abstinence first, then marriage/faithfulness, and then condoms. When I informed my local counterparts that we really had to stress abstinence and marriage as part of this program, they laughed at me. Abstinence? Marriage and/or faithfulness? You ain't from around here are ya gringo? Tell ya what, we'll bring up the abstinence and the marriage/faithfulness things but we'll be realistic and really focus on the use of condoms.

My community counterparts on this project were the obstetrician in my health post and the nurse health promoter. The target audience of the awareness campaign was high school students. We started out by giving all the students in the school a pre-test asking them about AIDS/HIV, how you can get infected, who can get it, etc. We then selected and trained a group of student health promoters and trained them on all that is HIV/AIDS. Later we gave charlas (talks) to all the students and teachers. We did activities where the students had fun, participated, gave their views, identified risky behaviors, and had hands-on practice (tee hee hee – actually the kids were pretty grown up about the whole thing and only snickered a little when we put rubbers on fake dicks.)

After our educational sessions, we had a bulletin board contest. One minor problem - none of the classrooms had bulletin boards. I used some of the grant money to buy materials to build bulletin boards for each class and the students assembled them in shop class. I went to a lumber yard with the shop teacher to buy the materials. There on the shop floor loaded with tripping hazards, they cut the wood to our specifications with open, unguarded table saws with no kill switches getting their fingers within millimeters of the spinning blades. It was a Certified Safety Professional's (CSP®) nightmare. When it came time to pay, it was about twice as much as I had budgeted. But all's well that ends well and the students did a nice job of building solid bulletin boards. Local leaders judged the bulletin board contest and the students were pretty creative and colorful, if not a bit graphic.

On World AIDS Day we did a pasacalle (parade/march) through the streets of Rio Grande. The students made signs, the health promoters wore tee shirts they designed, a little band played, and we walked through the streets making buya (noise). I'm not sure how much awareness we raised and it was hot as shit but maybe someone paid attention. At the end, we had soda crackers and chicha morada (a sweet purple corn drink – sounds kind of gross but it's not too bad once you get used to it).

At the end of the campaign, we gave a post-test to see what they learned. The results weren't as good as I'd hoped for but scores did improve by around 20%. The 1st and 2nd years students improved considerably. The average for the 5th year students (seniors), however, dropped. I chalk it up to senioritis since we gave the quiz the last week of school and they had probably checked out already.

Other projects on the horizon, pending funding, include changing out water supply tubes to increase the volume of potable water coming into my town, building cocinas mejoradas (improved wood burning stoves), recycling and viviendas saludables (healthy household) campaigns.

Vacaciones con la Familia – Part III

The fam in front of Monasterio de San Francisco
At dinner on Christmas eve.

Erotic exhibit at Larco Museum. Recievee doesn't look all that pleased - a little startled in fact

The honeymooners

Lima – Were it not for there fact that the sun literally only shines for 4 or 5 months out of the year, I could live in Lima. Like all big cities, it has some pretty sketchy, crime infested areas but it also has some great areas and nice middle class neighborhoods with their own special feel. But, aaahh, back to civilization and sea level. It was refreshing to land at Jorge Chavez airport and breathe that sweet, sweet, desert-damp, sea-level air and not walk 10 meters without having to stop and breathe. We went to the hotel and chilled for the night. The next day, we went to the Peruvian equivalent of Whole Foods called Vivanda. It might have been the highlight of Mom and Sam's trip – they raved about it. Our hotel was in an area called Miraflores. Miraflores is a wonderful place of Lima but it's certainly not representative of Peru. Miraflores is where the rich, the pitucos, the "Haves" of Peru live.

In Lima we did the touristy double-decker bus ride. As we approached the enter of Lima, an historic but kind of shady area with a lot of crime, the view from the second story of the touristy bus was much better than the street level where all the shenanigans go on. During the tour we popped into the San Francisco Monestary, a church that had catacombs stuffed with thousands of bones. Later we hit Larco Mar, a shopping mall built on the side of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean complete with a Tony Roma's, Chili's and TGI Fridays. We also visited a nice museum that had a whole exhibition hall dedicated to pre-columbian porn ceramics that turned me and my brother into giggling adolescents.

Christmas in Peru is celebrated at the stroke of midnight. Families gather on Christmas Eve, have dinner, eat paneton (sort of like fruitcake), drink hot chocolate, open presents and drink. We celebrated Christmas by eating at the only restaurant that was open - Chili's. Ordinarily you wouldn't catch me dead eating at a Chili's in the US unless I was in some bullshit suburb with no other choices, but it's amazing how delicious a chicken fried chicken with mashed potatoes and white cream gravy is after a year living here.

It was great to see the family again and spend some time together during the holidays.

Vacaciones con la Familia – Part II

Mom and I on the floating islands of Uros
The fam on the island of Taquile, Lake Titicaca in the background

Some temple (?) carved out of rock. The tour guide gave us some explanation about it but it sounded like some shit he just made up.

Puno – From Arequipa we took a five hour bus ride to the city of Puno. Puno is on the high plains in the south Peru on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world - high meaning around 3,800 meters or 12,500 feet above sea level. Now 12,500 feet didn't sound all that high but it is. After all, there's a group of folks called 14ers who climb peaks of 14K or higher for fun and that's only 1,500 feet higher than where we were, if my math adds up. Anyway, the altitude got to all of us and the Peruvian food got the best of my Mom and bro (happens to all the gringos) so we were winded whilst sprinting to the bathroom.

Lake Titicaca has a series of man-made floating islands called the Uros Islands. The floating islands are made of reed roots and reeds lashed together. Around six to ten families live on each floating island in tiny little houses also made of reeds. According to the guide, they eke out their living by fishing, gathering eggs, hunting, bartering and tourism. It was pretty cool hopping off the boat onto a floating, living island but to be quite honest, it was pretty touristy and I doubt that any of the folks actually lived on them. I've heard here and there that the people living on these islands are from the sierra and moved there to make a living off tourism and to avoid paying taxes. Either way, it's a tough way to earn a living. Looking beyond that, it was pretty cool to see a manmade floating island that was built the same way they did back in the olden days. Come to think of it, I don't recall the guide explaining why anyone would originally live that way in the first place – probably to get the hell away from some conquering assholes.

From the floating islands, we went to an actual island called Taquile. On the boat trip out there, I sat at the aft of the boat enjoying the sun and thinking that this looks a bit like the Greek Isles except I'm freezing and can't breathe. When we arrived at Taquile the guide pointed up and said we're going up there. So up we hiked because that was where lunch was (20 steps, stop, try to breathe, 20 steps, stop, try to breathe). Painful but worth the view. It was a nice walk on the way down with some impressive vistas.

I've been in Peru for over a year now and have seen poverty but not the Christian Children's Fund, Sally Struthers, fly in eyeball kind of poverty. Here in Puno, however, there was abject poverty. Everywhere we went, there were moms with their kids in their papooses on their backs waiting in a big-ass line for a little bit of Christmas paneton (fruit cake?), hot chocolate and maybe a gift for their baby. It wasn’t the kind of mom hacking of the kid's hand to make them more beggable kind of poverty like in Haiti but still heart wrenching to see especially during the Christmas season.

Vacaciones con la Familia Part I

Mom, Sam and I in Arequipa - Volcano Misti in the background
The fam in front of a church outside of Arequipa

What remains of the cuy I had for dinner

I spent Christmas this year with Mom and by brother here in Peru. They came down for a visit to celebrate both Christmas and my Mom's birthday (I was going to say my Mom's 70th birthday but she'd get pissed off at me so I'll just say we celebrated her birthday. For the record, I hope I look as good and get around as good as my mom when I'm 70 – if I even make it that far).

Everyone in my town of Rio Grande was asking if the fam was going to make it down to The Big RG but it's hot as hell there right now and I wanted to check out a different corner of this beautiful country. Originally, we had planned on visiting Huaraz, a mountain town with spectacular views of the Cordillera Blanca - high, snow-capped peaks which are being melted away by global warming at an alarming rate (insert your bullshit political view here). Unfortunately there were protests and civil unrest about mining operations a few weeks before. The riots had calmed down a bit but threatened to start back up again. As interesting as that sounded to me, the last place I needed to take my family on vacation was to see a bunch of pissed off, rock-hurling youths from a bus that was caught in the middle of the commotion. So, we went for Plan B (you always have to have a Plan B in Peru – or anywhere for that matter). Plan B wasn't so bad. First to Arequipa and then to Puno/Lake Titicaca then back to Lima to celebrate Christmas.

Arequipa – For some strange reason Mom and Sam weren't down for a 15 hour bus ride from Lima to Arequipa (even though it's a nice bus) so we flew. Flights are not that much more than the bus so it made sense on such a short time frame. Arequipa is a great city. Old colonial buildings build out of white volcanic rock called sillar, lots of history, and nice vistas of dormant and active volcanoes. There, we took a pretty touristy double-decker bus ride to check out the city and its surroundings. There, I rocked the shit out of some rocoto relleno (stuffed Peruvian chili peppers) and ate my first cuy chactado (fried guinea pig). Imagine eating your little childhood friend Sparkles, skinned, battered, fried and served in its entirety (head, eyeballs, teeth, claws and all) with a side of mixed vegetables. Tasted a little like rattlesnake, which tastes like gamey chicken, with just as many bones. Apparently cuyes are very high in protein, low in cholesterol (until deep fried) and reproduce like their rabbit cousins.

School Daze

Entrance to the school

Kids during ag class (it's very hot by the way)

Kids in science class

I've been doing a fair amount of work in the escuela secundaria (middle/high school) in my town. The school is called Institución Educativa José Abelardo Quiñones named after a Peruvian fighter pilot who, after he was shot down by an Ecuadorian artillery unit during the Ecuadorian-Peruvian War of 1941, kamakazeed his plane into the battery that shot him down. Peru actually won that war so he's kind of a national hero and is on the 10 Sol bill.

The school has a couple of smallish two-story brick and concrete buildings with classrooms, an administrative office and a computer lab and another one-story building with classrooms and shop classes. There is a little concrete futbol/basketball court in the middle of the buildings. I was pretty excited when I saw the basketball court and was ready to play ball but the backboards are all jacked up. Too many kids dunkin'? Mmm… Probably not. (Confusing but amusing fact - the Spanish word Aula = Classroom. The word Jaula = Cage)

Kids here go to secundaria between the ages of around 11 or 12 until they're 16 or 17. There are around 130 students in 5 grades. Class size ranges between 10 – 30 students. Staff includes one director (principal), an assistant, a janitor, seven teachers, an adult hall monitor (who is also the referee for the local cock fights), a part time PE teacher and an English teacher who barely speaks a lick of English. As in the US, teachers here are overworked, underpaid and underappreciated.

The school year runs from April until December. They're off during the summer months of January through March because it's just too damn hot. Classes start at 8am and go until 1:30 with a recess/snack break at around 11:00. They study the typical HS courses like math and science and also take practical, more hands-on courses like agriculture, metal shop, and wood shop. A couple times a week the kids have physical education where they do exercises, run track, play futbol, volleyball, and basketball (even though the backboards are unusable). There is a school band but there are no organized sports teams. I haven't seen any dopey, cocky meatheads wearing their letter jackets terrorizing the guy carrying the clarinet case.

Graduation is just a couple of weeks away. Some of the 5th year kids are going to attend the Instituto (junior college) in town studying either tourism, mechanics, computers, nursing, or agriculture. Some of the brighter students will spend about a year studying for a university entrance exam and hopefully get accepted. Many have few options and will leave town to look for work in the fields or doing construction. Imagine leaving home at 16 years old to brave this sometimes very cruel world.

So far working with these kids has been the highlight of my Peace Corps experience. They're bright, respectful, and appreciative and really a lot of fun to be around unlike their spoiled counterparts in a little place called America.