Project Peru Review
Check out the new video – Peru Review: Pictures from the Nourish International Summer 2009 Peru Project
La Jefa
Kat Burns—Director of Public Health Programs, micromanager, general, den mother—is fondly dubbed La Jefa, the boss.
Up at dawn with the rest of us, La Jefa stops in the courtyard to check on the month-old puppies between bites of breakfast, making a mental note to take them to the vet in Trujillo next week. As we hurriedly cobble together avocado-and-cheese sandwiches, Kat collects tape measures from the archaeology students staying in the lab house for the day, so that we can borrow them for our health assessments. She leaps upstairs to tell us that the bus is here, to grab scales, surveys and go! We yank our toothbrushes out of our mouths, scooping up bags of rice to give to survey participants. Shovels and daypacks in tow, we scramble into the van.
An hour later, we’re in the valley, having picked up the nurses in the city on the way and dropped off the latrine team in Ciudad de Dios. Indiana Jones hat perched on her curly hair, Kat deftly navigates the roads through the cane fields with a cell phone to her ear. First it’s Kevin: “Who has the key to the schoolhouse where the PVC pipes are kept?” Next its an Engineers Without Borders volunteer: “Can we help the Water Committee set up a payment plan so a family can afford to get on the water line?”
Followed by the van, she drives deeper into the sugar cane, parking her clunky gray sedan in the middle of the dirt road to ask some laborers how to get to Las Cocas. We have a map, but the map has no roads—only houses in the sugar cane, and, occasionally, the names of the families who live there. After fifteen minutes, we’ve finally oriented ourselves. As the health assessment team heads off on foot, Kat hops back in the car.
La Jefa and members of the health assessment team meet at Ciudad de Dios for lunch.
The rest of the morning is spent dropping the visiting nurse practitioner off at Trujillo’s public hospital, finagling permission for her to observe the emergency care unit and talk to a doctor or two. Stuck in traffic, she recognizes the face of a passing pedestrian from Moche and stops to arrange a meeting later in the week. Next, we go to the carpenter’s to check on the doors and discuss the design of a small seat for the latrines.
On the way back to the valley, La Jefa lists the day’s schedule. She has a meeting with the Water Committee at one, then a community meeting in Santa Rosa to ask if we can conduct the surveys there. Then it’s off to Bello Horizonte to remind the pregnant ladies about the prenatal classes next week. She’ll take the EWB volunteers to the airport while we head home.
Back at the house, we organize the completed surveys of the day and use a random number generator to choose houses on tomorrow’s map. The latrine team discusses relocating the third latrine: they’ve hit a boulder halfway down the first hole. We don’t see Kat again until after dinner, when we meet in Spanglish to go over finances, data entry, and prenatal classes. Finally—dusty, exhausted, and tense from the day’s hard work—we goof off for a while and head to bed early.
La Jefa calls every kid in Ciudad by name and breaks up dog fights sin temor. She knows all the right people and draws maps with a rock in the dirt. She coordinates rides, supplies and schedules, and is quick with a joke or smile. Things rarely run smoothly around here, but La Jefa helps us juggle the details and keep the chaos in check.
Kat talks with Andres, the latrine team's go-to guy.
Close up: Life in the Moche Valley
A peek into a day of health assessments in the Moche Valley.
Dusty air. The kind that settles in your lungs and under your fingernails.
The caw of a rooster, loud and hungry. KIKIRIKI it screams, over and over.
A litter strewn street, where a combi rumbles by, kicking up dust from the unpaved road.
A door made of tin roofing, latched to its ‘hinges’ with twine. It bangs back and forth with the morning wind.
Past the door lies the yard, though lacking that lush shade of green we know so well. In its place is a struggling garden of maize and other plants, sprouting defiantly out of the brown earth.
A clothing line, mended with various strings, droops with the weight of faded, worn items, drying in the spotty sun.
Swat the flies away as you step inside. The uneven dirt floor of the house is worn down with repeated shuffles of dirty flip flops to and fro.
The meagerly decorated adobe walls glow as the lone light bulb sways from its perch near the tarp that serves as a ceiling.
A kindly woman offers you her own seat, a sullied lawn chair—the best seat in the house. As you sit down, the crouched morsel of a woman hands you a cup of jugo, complete with blessings and welcomes to her humble dwelling.
Settling in for the hour-long ‘encuesta de salud’, you take mental notes of all you just experienced and prepare to travel through the jumbled and often sad history of this woman’s life.
Such is the day we’ve come to expect each morning as we set out to implement health assessments for all the communities of the Moche Valley.
The disparity between ourselves and the people we’ve come to help hangs in the air, along with the common ‘gringos’ slang used to describe us. Each day I meet someone new, my eyes open a bit wider to the situation these people live in and how better we can serve them. Although living in substandard housing with no bathrooms, scraping to feed their families, the kindness and openness these individuals have shown our organization is overwhelming. The women invite us into their homes; the men greet us as we pass them on our search; and the children are endless sources of energy and questions.
Today we completed our field work for the health assessments, and while we are glad to have reached our goal, the process itself has been very rewarding. To be welcomed so intimately into a community and treated with the utmost hospitality, while we ask our hosts to divulge their most personal information has made an enormous impression on all of us.
Six Feet Under
Generally the mention of an older man being six feet under ground would elicit feelings of sorrow and sympathy. When our team heard the news, we were pumped.
The site of our third latrine is in the backyard of an elderly couple’s property. They have a daughter that spends much of her time in their house, a son who works construction in Trujillo, and at least two grandchildren. The older man was ecstatic about the prospect of the new latrine, and he delightedly showed us around his property in search of the perfect location. As we marked out the 2 x 2 meter square, he offered his services and those of his son to help dig the hole.
We were excited about having his son onboard, picturing an experienced, strapping young construction worker. But we exchanged some skeptical smiles at the thought of this hobbled old gentleman with a pick-axe and a shovel. We weren’t expecting his contribution to be much beyond his enthusiasm and some words of wisdom. This couldn’t have been more incorrect.
We were greeted yesterday with the sight of the elderly man, shirtless, in the bottom of an almost entirely completed hole. The son was working along-side, but the alacrity with which his father was beating the ground with the pick, and the rippling muscles barely contained by his aged Peruvian skin, identified the real power-house of this operation. We self-consciously hopped into the hole to give them a breather, knowing that progress was actually going to slow with inexperienced young gringos manning the shovels. The grandfather chuckled to himself as he watched us dig.
This was hardly the first time that the incredible Peruvian vitality took us by surprise. Two Peruvian brothers dug the first latrine’s hole in only three hours—a feat that our team of six struggled to accomplish in three days. We were assisted in digging the second hole by a nursing mother. She would remove the baby from her teat, work her shift with the shovel, and replace the baby during her break. On the work-day to repair the water-system, we passed her seventy year-old mother walking to the dig site armed with not one, but two shovels.
The individuals in Ciudad de Dios lack many basic resources, from health-care to education. But at least among the families we have had the pleasure of knowing from the latrine project, one resource they do not lack is resilience. Many of our projects are made possible by their incredible work ethic and fortitude. As privileged, educated volunteers and donors it is easy to look upon beneficiaries of development projects as needy, helpless or inferior. But it is important to remember that having need does not make you needy, requiring help does not make you helpless, and being a member of a low socio-economic stratum does not make you inferior.
Needless to say, as I attempted to shovel dirt out of the hole even half as fast as my elderly Peruvian counterpart, my shirt stayed on.