Sunday, July 27, 2008

Fiestas Patrias

Peru is currently in the midst of celebrating Fiestas Patrias, the celebration of its Independence from Spain. As far as I can tell so far, the celebration mainly consists of parades, which is nothing out of the ordinary. Peru seems to specialize in random parades, sometimes for a legitimate reason but usually not. I'm convinced that if I wanted to I could very easily throw my own parade without notifying anyone. It may be unorganized, disrupt traffic, and have no point, but who cares...it´s a parade!

Anyway, because it is a national holiday, Peace Corps gives us four vacation days. Thus, I decided to travel, along with the rest of Peru and three friends, to Huaraz. Located between the Cordillera Blanca and the Cordillera Negra, Huaraz is a bustling Andean mountain city located at 3052 meters above sea level.

Getting here was an experience of course. My friend Susan was put in charge of buying tickets and she opted for the normal bus instead of the one with beds. Mind you it was a night bus, so sleeping would have been preferred. To travel on the one with beds would have cost a whole $3.00 more so maybe that deterred her. She also decided to put us in the two front seats, directly behind the big glass window separating the passengers from the front cabin where the driver and his assistent reside. Now, normally, in Susan's defense, this is not problematic. However, it just so happens that this particular assistant, hired to keep the driver awake on the 10 hour ride, was darn good at his job. In fact, I don't think he could have been better suited for his line of work. He was so good that at three in the morning he was still beating his hands on the dashboard to the raging techno he had a penchant for. The man, who was at least 40, definitely did not look like the techno type. He also had a really loud and distinctive guffaw and a proclivity for using swear words rather heedlessly.

When we finally got there in the morning it was freezing. I packed shoes this time but I still arrived wearing sandals. As the luggage was being unloaded from under the bus one of the compartments popped open by itself and a man crawled out. Apparently he slept under there which had to be an interesting experience given that the bus was snaking through mountains. All in all, the trip was well worth it because the city has some impressive views of some of the tallest peaks in Peru, including the tallest, Huascaran, which tops off at 6768m. The city also boasts its fair share of appetizing restaurants catering to the large number of gringos who come to trek and climb. And there are a lot of them, gringos that is. They are easy to spot of course, standing about a foot above the rest of the crowd and sporting expensive outdoor gear. The prices in Huaraz reflect the tourists that arrive. Aji de gallina that costs S/.3 in Chiclayo can cost you upwards of S/.13 here.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Typical

I actually took the time to wash an apple before eating it, a precaution I never take. Since I was getting over dysentery, most likely caused by food poisoning, I figured it was worth it. Upon opening my newly bought jar of peanut butter I encountered a swarm of ants. After exterminating most of the ants I walked back over to my bowl of sliced apple and stepped on the rim causing the apple pieces to fly everywhere. In the process I’m sure they picked up some more dysentery causing microbes, but I proceeded to apply peanut butter and eat them anyway.

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The cricket plague refuses to go away. The other night I woke up to crickets dive-bombing my tin roof. The next morning, I killed roughly 200 crickets, all of which were in my room. More continued trickle down from the cracks in the roof. Across Peru the rooms of fellow PCVs have become maniacal torture centers focused soley on the extermination of crickets.

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I lost my wallet the other day, which contained my bank card. I immediately called the Peace Corps office to have them cancel the card. However, a week later when I still hadn’t heard from them I called to check up on the situation to find that, in their words, “A random man called and reported that he had found my wallet in his car. No one contacted you?” Unless I unknowingly propelled my wallet through a car window, this was not feasible. And, I was never contacted by a random man informing me of the whereabouts of my bank card. Needless to say, Peace Corps finally canceled my bank card.

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A fellow volunteer of mine has a crush on one of the municipality workers in her area. She called me the other day to ask if a text message she wanted to send him was okay. It read, “Hubo sol hoy día, ahora soy más oscura.” This translates as, “Today there was sun for a brief moment, now I am dark/shady.” What she wanted to say was, “It was sunny today, now I am tanner.”

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Without fail I always use the word especie (species) when I am trying to say especia (spice). This leads to some awkward sounding conversations… “I like to put a mix of species on my pasta.” Or “These beans must have a different species in them.”

Presupuesto Participativo: Try Saying That Fives Times Fast

After a temporary suspension of the Presupuesto Participativo, it was resumed last Thursday by two technical specialists from the regional municipality. Basically they started the entire process over, which meant more useless, unproductive hours of hearing the same information repeated again. During the second meeting, Susan started drawing pictures of how to make the meeting better. Some examples: Punching the tech guy in the face, computer failure, chair fight, sedatives. The speaker managed to make a power point presentation that consisted of a mere 6 slides last for 3 hours. When he reached the slide about the environment he got sidetracked for a good 30 minutes before coming around to the topic at hand, at which point he decided to explain the benefits of improved cooking stoves. As he began to explain that traditional stoves consume wood, I figured he would follow through by explaining that the improved stoves are favorable because they consume less wood. Wrong. Out of the blue, he burst into an animated description of how the specific wood burned in the stoves emits toxic fumes and that improved stoves are good because the highly dangerous, life-threatening smoke is funneled outside into the environment. Amazingly, Susan and I made it through that meeting with out injuring ourselves or committing any crimes.

Voting day finally arrived and Susan and I were pleasantly surprised when we were both granted funds for our projects. Nonetheless, the meeting was no exemplary demonstration of democracy. While the meetings leading up to the voting suggested that voting would actually take place, what actually occurred was rather different. First of all, we were presented with a pre-prepared list of the projects that had been accepted along with the funds to be allocated to each. Then each agente participante, a person with the ability to voice their opinion and to vote, was allowed to defend/dispute the decision which had been made with regard to their project. Flaw 1: no actual changes reflecting the opinions of the people were made. Imperceptible word changes were made which appeased the majority, but no critical semantic changes occurred. With regard to the funds allocated, not a single change was made. I raised the point that spending 20,000 soles to improve the bathrooms in the market was absurd, especially given that this project was never previously discussed but randomly appeared on the list of approved projects. Everyone agreed but nothing changed. Flaw 2: there will be no accountability for those projects that have been approved. Take the bathroom project. With regard to the complaint I raised, I was told that any money that remained from the renovation would be used elsewhere. The problem is that elsewhere probably means the mayor’s own pocket. No one was required to turn in a profile of their projects and no research was done to determine how much money the projects will actually cost. All of the money that was designated for projects was listed in nice even sums like 10,000 or 40,000 soles with no breakdown of what that money will be spent on. I’ve heard that it is a common practice to receive the money and then bribe people to write false receipts to account for money that is spent elsewhere. Flaw 3: Peruvian law was blatantly overlooked at least twice. Indeed, I was present as an agente participante despite the fact that this is illegal according to Peruvian law. At the end of the meeting they tried to elect me as the president of the comité de vigilancia, the committee which ensures that the funds are allocated and spent correctly. I pointed out that it was illegal for me to accept the post and that it should be held by a Peruvian who actually understands how the system works. However, they proceeded to elect me to the position of treasurer on the Consejo de Coordinación Local, apparently a very important committee. Given that I don’t have any idea what its function is and that I detest balancing checkbooks, I think it was a bad idea to elect me. Regardless, I gave up arguing the legality of the issue and accepted anyway.

The bottom line is that this process could be a very effective way to distribute funds within the country but it isn’t. Corruption and an uneducated populace prevent it from being a positive step towards sustainable development.

Godmother of a Beautiful New……….Spotlight

Throughout Perú and much of Latin America, nearly every town and community celebrates a patron saint. Currently Pacora, my municipality, is celebrating the birth of San Pablo, the patron saint of the town. While the central day of the festival is the 30th of June, the celebration is already in full swing and I’ve been told it doesn’t end until the 13th of July. For weeks now, the plaza has been completely surrounded by temporary restaurants and vendors, each one blasting a different cumbia song at inordinate volumes. Recently, a really frightening train posing as a children’s ride was set up on one corner of the plaza. I saw it running the other day and I honestly can not imagine putting a child on board, let alone paying to do so. It runs at ludicrously high speeds all the while emitting disturbing noises.

I’m struggling with the fact that this festival is supposedly in honor of a saint. I attended a large mass in honor of the patron saint with my host-mom and even that didn’t convince me. However, that probably had something to with the fact that in the middle of the mass they decided to hold a benediction for recently installed spotlights. Of course no blessing is complete without godfathers and godmothers and I soon found myself holding one of the ten red strings dangling down from the new lights. Mind you, I had no clue what I was being named a godmother of until the next day and, thus, assumed that holding the red string had some more grandiose significance. My host-mom was also included as a godmother, along with 8 other unsuspecting people. After the priest made the rounds blessing the lights, splashing each of us in the face with holy water, we were asked to make a donation. The woman collecting the money paused briefly in front of me but I stared at her awkwardly until she walked away. At this point I assumed we would return to our seats and listen to the rest of the mass. Instead, we were taken to a small room on the side of the church where we were fed. First, they gave us whiskey cocktails. Not what I expected. My mom didn’t drink hers so she gave it to me. I was the only one there that drank two of them and I’ll just say that I was feeling it by the time I was done. The alcohol was promptly followed by chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches. I even would have eaten the chicken, despite the fact that my host-mom thinks I never eat it, but I despise mayonnaise. And knowing that it had come from a bottle that said “Please refrigerate after opening,” directions that had certainly been disregarded, I just couldn’t do it. My host-mom said she didn’t want my sandwich and then proceeded to take a second sandwich from the tray. Thus, I was forced to stuff the large chicken and mayonnaise sandwich into my pocket. That wasn’t awkward. Once we had finished we were brought back into the mass which I sat through somewhat buzzed. I’ll say that it was more entertaining than a normal mass but I didn’t feel any holier for attending.

The next day I met Susan at the fiesta. First we went to the soccer game, where after about an hour we realized we were indeed the only females there. Roughly half of the people there had mullets so we probably should have left. One man tried to pick us up by throwing a rock at Susan’s head. That was ingenious. At one point an older man walked in and, despite the large amount of blatantly obvious empty seating, sat directly next to me. This I contribute to the inexistence of the concept of personal space in Peru; however, once he realized who he was sitting by, his interests turned from the game to us. He passed the rest of the time staring at us with a baffled expression on his face. After the game we went back to the plaza, where we attempted to avoid joining the large quantities of young Peruvians incessantly circling the park. We decided to split a beer which was probably scandalous, since women here don’t tend to drink among themselves, at least not in public. Most of our time was spent people watching and ignoring drunken men. Compared to the first festival I attended back in January, I realized that I now viewed the festival from a different perspective, much more aware of who was there and more accurately able to describe what was going on. Later on we went to the dance, which is unlike anything you would call a dance in the States. The first thing we noticed was that, to enter was to enter accepting your fate in the case of fire. The only entrance and exit was through a tiny door, roughly four feet tall. Due to the current cricket plague, there were crickets everywhere, which made the already dirty locale a bit more disgusting. The crickets did have one upside: they made it easier to laugh at the drunken men who asked us to dance, as they usually approached with one perched like a pet on their shoulders. A trip to the bathroom revealed the grossest bathroom I’ve ever seen, complete with crickets. Imagine many human fluids of different forms and then imagine crickets jumping from those fluids onto your face.

To my surprise I returned to the festival the next day with my host-mother to attend the morning mass. Of course, we had to get there two hours early so we could sit and watch them set up. At 11:05, the local priest came over the loud speakers to say that the bishop from Chiclayo would be arriving shortly and that he was happy to announce that the mass would start on time. I found the announcement somewhat confusing given that the mass was supposed to start at 11:00. We ended up staying in Pacora until 6:00 pm which was somewhat tortuous given that I had no idea how long we were going to stay. We got lunch, not at one of the restaurants, but from a sketchy looking street vendor. Granted, we only paid $1 each, but I consider it a miracle that I suffered no ill effects. As we were leaving I had to laugh when a group of men offered me a drink only to receive a death glare from my host-mom. It shut them up immediately. If you’d seen it you would understand.