Jim´s Journey

Christmas Eve

2009-12-24T16:07:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve - La Buena Noche ("the good night") - is always a day of furious activity here, as everyone makes last minute preparations. Markets are crowded and overflow onto the streets, where many people take advantage of the crowds to sell flowers or cheap imported toys and other gifts.

Turkeys are herded into makeshift pens where they await their fate. Families bring their prepared turkeys to the nearest bakery, where for a few dollars it will be baked to perfection. Families of modest means usually have stoves that use LP gas cylinders. By making use of the bakery oven, they can bake a larger turkey (or pig) than will fit in their own oven, and not have to worry about running out of gas while baking.

Taxis and "motos" are in great demand and can charge higher fees. But many refuse to travel to the inner city, because traffic jams reduce the number of trips they can complete, and expose them to much higher risk of being robbed.

Another oven finished

2009-12-24T07:02:00.000-08:00

On Sunday we tested the oven that we completed on Friday, baking a dish of yams. Peruvians eat a lot of yams, both hot and cold, for everything from breakfast to dinner. Here Matías and Alfredo are preparing the stove for its first lighting. At this point we still hadn´t insulated the brick combustion chamber. It needs to be wrapped in fiberglass and aluminum foil to avoid wasting a lot of the heat from the fire.

El Presidente visits my neighborhood

2009-12-24T06:53:00.000-08:00

A few days ago the president of Peru, Alan Garcia, attended the inauguration of a new recreational facility for seniors, which had been under construction across the street from my apartment for the past two years. We brought some chairs up to the roof of my apartment and took a few shots. With my camera, that is. I was surprised how little security was provided for him. There were a few dozen soldiers and police with riot gear standing ready. But if I had rented out my roof to terrorists, they would have had an easy shot.

Loaning worms in Armatambo

2009-12-15T13:29:00.000-08:00

My friend Ana Suyo is always one of the first to know when I´m coming to Peru. She organizes groups of people who are interesting in learning about the energy-saving wood stoves and ovens that I´ve been building during the years that I´ve been working and vacationing here. Sometimes they show up and sometimes they don´t.

During the past week I´ve been teaching a group in Armatambo (a small neighborhood about ten minutes by mototaxi from where we live) to build ovens and stoves. The people are members of the same religious sect that I had worked with before in other parts of the city. Their "invasion" is one of the most recent in Lima, so they´ve had to take whatever land they could find. They settled near the top of a bare, rocky hill. Naturally there is no electricity or water available there yet.

They´re very poor, but very enthusiastic about learning something that will help to improve their lives. They hope to start a small business selling baked products. When we finish building the oven this weekend, I´m going to show them how to make cinnamon rolls. They´re also interested in creating a vegetable garden, but the soil is almost pure sand, so I´m showing them how to make a compost pile. I also found someone who sells worms, and I´m going to loan them 5 kilos of worms, which they can return after the worms have reproduced. They insist on paying for any materials that we use, and have already spent about $25 to build the oven and stove, so I felt uncomfortable asking them to spend another $8 on worms. Hence the loan.

In the last photo, we´re assembling a retained heat cooker from recycled cardboard, plastic bags and bottles. (It's essentially an insulated box where rice or beans can be cooked using their own heat once they've been brought to a boil.) An old lady (second from left) was passing by and when she heard that it was possible to cook without fire, she looked to the sky and said "It's a miracle!". She decided to stay and help us.

We´re Pregnant!

2009-12-15T12:42:00.000-08:00

We are happy to announce that a little Wilmes Contreras is on the way, expected to arrive in June. Right now we´re on vacation in Peru, escaping from the cold for a little while before I start my new job at Elanco. We arrived on the 4th and so far we´ve just been relaxing, visiting friends and enjoying some of the great Peruvian food that we´ve missed during the past year. Sonia does her best to recreate Peruvian recipes with American ingredients, but it´s never quite the same. We´re going to try to bring back a few potatoes and some seeds, and try to grow the things at home that we miss most.

It´s finally gotten fairly sunny today, so tomorrow we´ll probably head to the beach.

We're married!

2008-09-24T15:45:00.001-07:00

Sonia and I were married In Hartford, Connecticut on August 16 in an intimate ceremony with all of our extended family in attendance. The reception was held at the home of Sonia's uncle Benjamin. It was the first time in many years that all of my children and all of my brothers and sister were together at the same time. We enjoyed eating lots of Peruvian food and listening to Latin music.

We left Hartford with a car full of Sonia's clothes and the top layer of our wedding cake on ice in a cooler. (We'll let you know whether it still tasted like cake when we try to eat it next August 16). We drove all day Monday to Canada and spent three days there visiting Niagara Falls and the Welland Locks, and sampling some local food like Guiness Beef Pie and poutine (french fries with gravy and cheese), and the best barbecued ribs that Sonia has ever tasted (of the two times that she has tried them). We each gained a few kilos.

Niagara Falls is very impressive, and the falls on the American side of the border are the largest and pretties (but of course you need to be standing in Canada to see them). The Canadian dollar has now almost matched the US dollar in value (95 cents), so almost everywhere -- except of course the US border crossing -- the exchange rate is 1:1.

We also spent a few days on the coast of Lake Huron but never did find a beach that was sandy enough to go wading in the lake. We arrived home on Saturday exhausted but happy that we had been able to visit some places that neither of us had been.

Traveling With My Daughter

2007-12-23T16:50:00.000-08:00

My daughter Marta recently finished her student teaching and took a break from her North American routine to visit me in Peru for a couple of weeks. We calculated that we spent a total of about 100 hours riding on buses! Fortunately a large part of that took place at night. Our longest single trip was the return from Cusco to Lima, which lasted 26 hours.

After spending a day getting to know Chorrillos, we took off for Huaraz, making tours of several towns and parks in a high mountain valley between the two mountain ranges of Peru. We visited Pastoruri, a popular glaciar at 5000 meters above sea level that is melting rapidly and expected to disappear within eight to ten years.

We found time to visit a zoo in Lima, and Lucy and Walter´s project in Lurin, too, where Marta taught the kids a way to create a simple biographical poem.

Marta managed to stay healthy during the trip (with an occasional dose of ciprofloxacin) but finally succumbed to a bug when she got back home. :-(

Quick Tour of Cajamarca

2007-11-06T17:42:00.000-08:00

I recently made a trip to the border with Ecuador to renew my visa, as I do every ninety days. This time Sonia decided to accompany me, so we included a little side trip to Cajamarca, a city in the mountains about halfway to the border. It´s the place where Francisco Pizarro and his mob began their conquest of the Inca empire, capturing the Inca king, holding him for a ransom of gold and silver, and then killing him. He and a few hundred soldiers killed the Inca´s five thousand defenders in the main plaza of Cajamarca without suffering a single casualty, thanks to their possesion of guns and horses. It has been estimated that over the next hundred years or so the population of South America was reduced by eighty to ninety percent, mostly because of diseases introduced by the Europeans.

Cajamarca is known as the dairy capital of Peru, and we visited one of the oldest haciendas in the region, where the cows are called by name to come to the trough and eat. (Actually the cows are lined up single file by one person, and another person calls them by name to enter the stall with their name over it. So it´s not as if the cows respond to their name, but they do seem to remember which stall belongs to each of them.)

We also took a couple of scenic tours, one to las Ventanillas de Otuzco (the windows of Otuzco), a pre-inca burial ground which was raided by the Spaniards looking for gold and silver objects that might have been buried with the dead in the small graves carved out of a cliff, leaving thousands of empty graves that now resemble windows. We also visited a regional park in Cumbemayo called El Bosque de Las Piedras (the Rock Forest). Besides having lots of interesting rock formations caused by erosion, it is home to the oldest known aqueduct in the Americas, a nine-kilometer canal carved out of the mountains around 1200 B.C.

Lord of the Miracles

2007-11-06T17:14:00.000-08:00

October is known as the ¨purple month¨ in Lima. It´s the time when literally millions of people join processions to venerate a religious icon known as El Señor de los Milagros (Lord of the Miracles). The priests and other VIPs in the processions wear purple vestments. The icon is a replica of a famous painting of the crucified Christ that was made on an adobe wall by a black painter during the sixth century. An earthquake leveled almost all of the buildings in Lima in 1746, but the painting was untouched, and some viewed its survival as a case of divine intervention. Later, according to the legend, a young man who was suffering from an incurable disease went to the wall every day to pray, and was cured of his disease. He then organized a group of people to make weekly venerations at the wall, and over the years the practice developed into the more elaborate processions that now take place every year.

The largest and longest procession takes place on October 28 and 29. It begins in the morning and finishes on the following morning, and follows a simple rectangular circuit in the center of the city, making one detour into a hospital to offer hope to the ill. It covers only a few kilometers because the icon is very heavy (framed in lots of silver and gold) and requires about thirty people to carry the platform on which it sits. Each team of porters slowly walks a few blocks over a period of an hour, then hands it off to a new team. At each change of the guard, the flowers adorning the platform are removed and new ones placed on it. People decorate some parts of the route just hours before the procession arrives, making religious symbols in the street with colored sawdust and flower petals.

A group of veiled women walks in front of the icon carrying incense, and a group of men dressed in purple walks behind the icon. There are several stands set up along the route where the procession stops so that the dignitaries of the organizations who finance the event can be recognized and say a few words. And of course there are ambulatory vendors everywhere, most of them selling turrón, a very dense, dry cake with purple frosting, adorned with lots of sprinkles.

You can stand on one of the side streets and watch the procession go by, or you can take the plunge and join the ocean of humanity walking in front of, alongside and behind the icon. But once immersed in the flow, you pretty much lose control of your movement. Sonia and I decided to join the procession so that I could get closer to the icon and get some good pictures. The crowd pressed from behind, and when the street narrowed it pressed in from both sides. The best we could do was to stay on our feet and try to anticipate curbs and other obstacles, and then plan our exit a block in advance. It was the only time in my life that I feared that I could be trampled. Fortunately we survived the experience and managed to get some good photos.

A Sawdust-Burning Stove

2007-11-05T19:10:00.000-08:00

I became interested in sawdust-burning stoves when I saw one in a comedor several weeks ago that hadn´t been used for quite a while. The owner said that the neighbors complained whenever they used it because it produced a lot of smoke. It seemed like a really good idea, since sawdust is at least 5 times cheaper than firewood. I decided to see if I could find a less polluting way to burn it. I found a couple different designs on the internet, the most promising one by a former Peace Corps volunteer. It consists of a metal container (recycled can or cylinder) with a hole in the bottom placed on top of a couple of bricks. A tube is inserted into the hole while you fill the container with sawdust and tamp it down. Then you carefully remove the tube, place a sheet metal donut over the top of it and seal the edges with a little sand or dirt. To light it, you just roll up a sheet of newspaper and light the bottom end. To use it as a stove you have to place a couple of metal bars across the top to support the pot. The cylinder I used is about 10 inches wide and 20 inches high. In my version of the stove, I riveted another, larger diameter cylinder to the one containing the sawdust, so that most of the pot sits down inside the cylinder, improving heat transfer to the pot.

I like my wood-burning bread oven and use it a lot. But sometimes I´d like to be doing other things while my bread or cake is baking. If I´m not monitoring it every four or five minutes and adding wood when needed, it´s impossible to maintain a constant temperature. So I´m hoping to use the same principle to convert my oven to use sawdust, too. But in the sawdust stove above, the diameter of the burning sawdust (and hence the surface area) slowly increases as the sawdust is consumed, causing the temperature to rise gradually but significantly. So I´ve built another version of a sawdust burner to use with my oven. It uses the same type of cylinder, but before packing it with sawdust I insert four triangular metal forms, creating four smaller columns of sawdust each with a constant width. I´ve tested it and it seems to burn at a pretty constant temperature. Now I just have to play with the size of the opening and the height of the sawdust column to achieve the particular temperature that I want for baking.

Testing The Market For My Cakes

2007-10-27T16:46:00.001-07:00

A couple of times a month I´ve made cakes to share with my friends, always with healthy stuff like wheat germ and bran and fruits or vegetables like pumpkin, bananas or coconut, nuts and raisins. Many of my friends have encouraged me to try to sell my cakes, so I decided I would give it a try. I made four cakes -- banana, pumpkin, apple and corn, and I sold sixty packaged pieces in a few hours just by walking around offering them to my neighbors, and I got a request for one whole extra cake. So I think I´ll start doing this every weekend, maybe more often when Sonia finally opens her stand in the market.

4th Anniversary of Lurín Workshop

2007-10-27T16:13:00.000-07:00

Last week we celebrated the fourth anniversary of Lucy and Walter´s workshop for kids in Lurín. And a mini-documentary of the workshop was published recently on a web site called No Apta Para Adultos (Not Appropriate For Adults). You can view it at http://napa.com.pe/2007/09/14/napa-16-union-es-fuerza. Just click on the ¨play¨ icon in the video window to start playing the video. The first several minutes of the program are about discrimination against speakers of the Quechua language, and the second part of the program is about Lucy´s kids. It´s all in Spanish, of course, but one thing that´s clear from the video portion alone is how much poise and confidence these kids have developed over the four years that Lucy and Walter and their volunteers have worked with them.

Census, Peruvian Style

2007-10-14T20:37:00.000-07:00

I´ve always said the Peruvians are creative people. But their approach to the 2007 census is one that I doubt any other country has ever used. The last detailed census that produced any information of value was over 20 years ago. It´s always been difficult to get people to cooperate, as they´re suspicious of any government official who comes around asking for personal information. But an even bigger impediment, as you know from my earlier postings, is that they can´t rely on the postal service to implement the census, so the questionnaires have to be done in person. And with many people working six or seven days a week, it´s almost possible to make contact with everyone on the same day.

So someone in the government decided that the they should just paralyze the country for a day, make everyone stay home, and send out an army of volunteer surveyors. And if everything goes as planned, not a person will stir from his or her house between 8 am and 6 pm this Sunday, October 21, except for a serious emergency (unless you work in the airport or a hospital or some other essential service). If you should happen to forget, or not know that it´s census day, your local policeman will invite you to return to your house. Even after you´ve completed your survey, you can´t leave your house. I guess they thought that if they allowed that, many people would just lie about it.

Well, this is just too tempting. I´m going to have to sneak out at least long enough to see whether they really succeed in shutting down the city, and go snap a couple pictures of the deserted streets.

Oh, and the army of volunteers? They figure they need about 600,000. At last count, ten days before the census was to begin, they had a total of just over 200,000.

Testing New Stoves for the Comedores

2007-10-02T17:13:00.000-07:00

After measuring the pots used in the various comedores, I began looking around in the chatarreros (vendors of recycled stuff) to see what sizes of recycled barrels I could find that would be a good fit. One of the most commonly used pots is 40 cm in diameter, and I found a barrel that is 44 cm, almost a perfect fit after allowing a small space for the smoke to escape. I made a prototype and installed it in the comedor at Huaycan, the one that´s farthest away from where I live but where the people were the most enthusiastic about wanting my help. The stove has an opening at the bottom for feeding the wood, which leads into a brick-lined combustion chamber surrounded by insulation (in this case fiberglass wool, but ashes work fine, too). The pot is supported by a couple of steel rods which sit a few centimeters above the chamber. The hot air hits the bottom of the pot and then flows up along the sides of the pot before escaping from the barrel at the top. The combustion chamber gets very hot because of the insulation and the restricted entry of cold air, so there´s practically no irritating smoke emitted. At the right you can see how they have been cooking over an open fire, with a couple of bricks to support the pot. The new stove will use less than half as much wood as the old one, and it cost about $5 to make. Their current daily expense for wood (cooking three pots at a time) is $1.50, so the stove will pay for itself in just a few weeks.

The group who run the comedor also have a large (2 meter diameter) dome shaped bread oven that they had built to start a bakery. They´ve never gotten it to work well, and they want me to help them with that, too. Unfortunately the oven was built without a chimney, which is probably a large part of the reason that it´s difficult to heat up. We´ve pretty much ruled out modifying it, for fear of damaging it, so I´m going to take along a friend next time who has worked with such ovens for many years. Maybe he can find a way to make it usable.

September Headlines

2007-10-02T17:12:00.000-07:00

A lot of interesting things have happened here during the past month. A large meteorite fell near Puno in the southernmost part of the country, leaving a crater 7 meters deep and 20 meters wide. After the local residents got over the shock and disproved the many rumors about toxic fumes and radioactivity coming from the site, they decided to make it a tourist site. They´ve built a fence around it to keep out treasure hunters and they´re going to put a roof over it to prevent erosion. But someone has convinced them that they should bring in a bulldozer and remove the meteor. Whether they´re planning to break it into pieces to sell to the tourists, or put it on display, I don´t know.

There was a referendum in several towns in the department of Piura over whether the residents want a mining company to begin operations there. The result was a resounding NO. A similar referendum was just completed in Ecuador with the same result. The last (and only other such) referendum in Peru produced a similar result despite intensive efforts by both the government and the mining company. This time the government claims that it isn´t bound by the results of the vote because of some technicality in the way it was organized, but a team of 30 international observers say that the voting was conducted fairly. Recently the Interior Ministry has proposed a new law that would make it possible for the goverment to take control over common use lands for purposes of national security. They claim it has nothing to do with the mine, but many suspect that it has everything to do with it, and that shortly the central government will take over the proposed mining site and lease it to the mining company.

Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori was finally extradited to Peru by Chile, where he´s been living under house arrest for more than a year after returning to South America with the intention of joining the presidential race. The irony is that the man he ousted from office and exiled from the country, Alan Garcia, is now president of Peru again, having won the election last year. So I don´t think Mr. Fujimori will be getting any breaks.

The long awaited mandatory vehicle inspections which were made law more than 19 years ago have finally become a reality. After years of legal wrangling over how and when and by whom the inspections would be performed, the city of Lima finally opened two processing centers, one in the far north of the city and the other in the far south, each capable of processing about a couple hundred vehicles per day. I don´t know how many vehicles there are in Lima, but there are about 8 million people, so even if everyone rode the buses, I don´t think they could inspect each vehicle once every year at that rate -- and the law requires publlic transit vehicles to be inspected twice per year! But capacity is only one of the issues to be solved. Mototaxis (mini taxis made from converted motorcycles) are also required to be inspected, but they´re not even allowed to drive on the major throughways, so how do they get to the inspection centers? So far the majority of vehicles have failed the tests, which include safety, structural integrity and emissions, Transit companies are complaining about the cost of the inspections and the long waits, but I think what really pisses them off is that they can´t find an inspector who will just accept a couple of extra bucks under the counter to let them pass the inspection.

A formerly unknown tribe of indigenouse people (known here as ¨uncontacted people¨) was observed by a helicopter flying over a region in the Amazon area. The sighting came at a very inconvenient time for a mining company which was in the middle of filing an environmental impact statement for a new development, and had claimed that the area was unpopulated.

Whirlwind Tour of Soup Kitchens

2007-08-28T18:45:00.000-07:00

I went for a long ride around various parts of Lima with Anita and Sylvia, two members of the religious group that is trying to establish soup kitchens, to see what opportunities there might be to help them save on fuel. We only spent a few minutes at each one, taking pictures and measurements. They were using lots of different fuels -- gas, when they could afford it, kerosene, wood, and even sawdust. They prefer gas because it´s somewhat cheaper than kerosene and a lot cleaner burning, but since one can only buy a tankful at a time (at a cost of about $10), when they´re short on cash (almost always) they have to settle for kerosene, which they buy a liter a time for less than a dollar.

Kerosene is burned in Primus stoves that look sort of like Coleman camping stoves, with a little pressurized tank and a manual pump. (See photo.) In some kitchens they prefer to use wood, but the neighbors always complain about the smoke. To burn sawdust they use a large empty cooking oil can that has a small door cut in one side. They place a large round stick upright in the middle of the container and pack sawdust all around it. Then they remove the log and remove the sawdust between the door and the hollow center, and start a fire in the middle. The door allows air to enter for combustion. Unfortunately the sawdust holds its shape well only if it is slightly wet, and that makes it burn much less efficiently, creating lots of smoke.

During the next few days I´ll develop a strategy for each kitchen (pot skirts, retained heat cookers, high efficiency wood stoves) and start teaching the people how to make and use the devices. The plan is that they will pay for the materials from their fuel savings.

A Darwinian Explanation of Bad Driving in Lima

2007-08-23T20:44:00.000-07:00

As I was talking to the taxi driver recently on my trip across the border from Ecuador to Peru, it occurred to me that there´s a very simple explanation for the fact that drivers in Lima are among the worst in the world. If you haven´t been to Lima, it´s pretty easy to understand what it´s like. Just imagine that everyone who drives a car here is participating in a game where the object is to get to your destination in the minimum possible time, and there only three rules: (1) Your vehicle cannot make contact with another vehicle except for incidental bumping of mirrors that may occur when you try to squeeze between two lanes of traffic, (2) If there is a policewoman (virtually all of the traffic police are women) physically present at an intersection, you have to stop when the stoplight turns red, and (3) You can´t drive on sidewalks when pedestrians are present.

My revelation occurred when the taxi driver, who seemed like a very normal driver, told me that he had lived in Lima for nine years before moving to the northern extreme of the country. He said that he hated driving a taxi in Lima because there was so much competition. So in order to make a decent living in Lima, a taxi driver has to really hustle. (There are no meters in taxis, so income is strictly related to distance traveled, not time of travel.) He has virtually no control over the price of his service, since he´ll have no customers if he charges more than others. And he has a limited amount of time to earn his daily wage. Darwin would probably look at this situation and say, ¨Of course they drive that way. It´s the only way they can survive.¨

A Public Mail System In Need of a Public

2007-08-23T20:20:00.001-07:00

Peru´s national mail system, SERPOST, is probably the most underutilized public service in the country. Hardly anyone trusts in its ability to deliver the mail. So the major utilities, for example, don´t use it to distribute their bills. They prefer to hire a private courier service or maintain their own staff of delivery people. Their customers generally don´t have bank accounts (partly because they don´t trust banks any more than they trust the postal service) and they certainly don´t trust postal employees to handle mail containing money. So they don´t use SERPOST to make utility payments, either. They prefer to ride a bus for half an hour to the nearest office of the utility and wait in line for an hour or more.

Consequently the volume of the service is so low that they have to charge very high prices for postage to cover their fixed costs (about $2 to mail a simple letter to the U.S. or $25 to send a two pound package -- both rates about double the rate for U.S. postage to Peru). And because they can only afford to place a couple of employees at each of their offices, many of the less frequently used services are offered in only a few locations. For example, if you want to purchase a $20 money order, you can go to any bank branch and pay a $10 commission to obtain one, while you can get one for just a $3 fee at SERPOST -- but only if you´re willing to go to their branch in Miraflores, about forty minutes from where I live.

As if to confirm the near invisibility of the postal service in Peru, the SERPOST office in Chorrillos doesn´t even have a sign anywhere identifying it as a post office. There is, however, one very positive aspect of this otherwise seemingly hopeless situation: nobody receives junk mail!

I Join a Doomsday Religious Sect

2007-08-23T19:39:00.000-07:00

The Evangelical Association of the Israelite Mission of the New Universal Pact is a fundamentalist, Old Testament based Christian group that was founded in Peru forty years ago and preserves some of the most ancient of pre-Christian traditions. Every Saturday at their central temple in Cieneguilla, about two and a half hours from where I live, they hold a service at their central temple where the main event is the ¨holocaust¨: they slaughter a lamb and burn it along with other offerings on a large wooden pyre built of seven layers of seven logs each. (Sorry, I don´t have any pictures to show you other than the entrance to the temple because they wouldn´t allow me to take any photos inside.) The temple grounds has separate entrances for men and women, and in the temple itself the men sit on the right side of the main aisle and the women on the left. There are no statues or images other than a replica of the ten commandments. They believe that Machu Picchu is the ¨navel of the world¨ referenced by the Bible in Ezequiel 38:12, and that their founder (who was born in Cusco and died in 2000) was a messiah who was sent by God to bring people back to the correct path. Following the prescriptions of the Old Testament, they don´t consume anything that is made from grapes, the men don´t cut their hair or beards, and the women wear a veil over their hair.

You may have heard of this group about eight years ago, when the end of the millenium was approaching. They were the ones who built a copy of Noah´s ark in the Amazon region to save some animal species and a few of their own members from the terrible deluge that would finish off the earth before the end of the year 2000.

I´m not sure how the group survived that disappointment, but they impress me as a group of people who are extremely dedicated to doing something about poverty, and not by looking for solutions from the outside. In fact, when I first sat down to talk with a couple of members about how I might be able to help them economize on fuel usage in the soup kitchens that their members run, the very first thing they told me was that if I wanted to work as a volunteer and share my knowledge, that was fine, but they were not interested in working with either government or non-government aid organizations. They feel that financial and material aid contributes to the culture of dependency, and the process of distribution of the aid is a strong temptation to corruption. And I think they´re exactly right on both counts.

OK, so I didn´t actually become a member. I´ve only joined their effort to help create self-sustaining comedores to provide an inexpensive daily meal in the hundreds of communities where their members live. One of my neighbors, Anita, is a member of the group. I´ve known her for a couple of years because she and her kids run the internet cafe on my street, but I had never known anything about her group until another of my neighbors recently told me that she was involved in working with these comedores. These groups are ideal candidates for the kinds of energy-saving technologies that I teach, because they cook such large quantities of food and a significant percentage of their operating budget goes to purchase fuel. And they use almost every kind of fuel available -- propane, kerosene, wood, charcoal, sawdust, maybe others -- so it will be an interesting challenge to adapt these technologies to all of the different fuels.

Earthquake

2007-08-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

I´m sure that by now everyone knows we had a pretty big earthquake here (7.0 on the Richter scale) on Wednesday, centered about a hundred miles southwest of Lima. Our power was out until yesterday, so I haven´t had any internet access. Lima was terrified and shaken but escaped with very little damage. The surprising thing was the duration of the quake -- almost two minutes. One report I heard on the radio said that there were actually quakes in two different places almost simultaneously. These pictures are from a Lima newspaper.

The major damage occurred in the province of Ica. A couple of churches were severely damaged (one during a mass, which resulted in a lot of deaths). Thousands of houses were damaged or destroyed. A tsunami warning was issued and was later canceled, but lots of fishing boats were driven ashore into buildings by high waves, so I assume there was at least a small tsunami.

We like to think that in times of disaster people come together and show their solidarity, but in this case an awful lot of people have been shamelessly taking advantage of the situation. Certainly there has been an outpouring of aid from people in other areas of the country and from other countries. But local residents have sacked stores whose walls were damaged by the quake; gangs of delinquents have roamed the affected areas at night stealing whatever they want from the damaged houses; bandits have robbed trucks carrying relief supplies at gunpoint as they edged slowly along the damaged roads; bus companies have doubled their fares from Lima to Ica.

The government has announced a program to compensate the victims, paying several thousand dollars to each family to help them rebuild. But that program will undoubtedly be abused too. My friend Walter, a psychologist who has worked in relief efforts for other quakes, says that he has often seen people whose houses were unaffected by the quake personally destroying their own houses so that the government would pay for a new one.

Independence Day Celebration

2007-07-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

I invited my friends to a North American style barbecue last weekend to celebrate the independence days of both countries. (Peru´s independence day is July 28). I had hoped to serve BBQ ribs, but quickly discovered that no one sells slabs of ribs, only chopped up ribs with a very thick slab of fat, which are deep fried in more pig fat to make chicharrón, generally considered the tastiest way to prepare pork in Peru. A few stores sold prepackaged ribs already marinated in barbeque sauce, but they were charging about $5 per pound, way beyond my budget. So I bought a bunch of chickens and some bratwurst, and made cole slaw (one Peruvian cabbage is big enough to make cole slaw for 25 people) and bread rolls. I made a lot of extra rolls to have some left over, but they were all gone by the end of the afternoon.

Lots of Unrest in Peru

2007-07-09T15:12:00.000-07:00

The last two weeks we have seen lots of strikes and protests, especially in the poorer southern part of the country, many of which have resulted in violent clashes with police trying to control them. And at least eight more major strikes are planned during the coming week, including teachers, health workers, municipal workers and others. Some are limited to a few days duration, but others are planned as actions of indefinite length until their demands are resolved.

There are many reasons for the increase in discontent. At the root of the problem is the extreme inequality of economic development across the country. Peru´s economy has seen an average growth rate of about 6% for more than 6 years, and is currently growing at about 8%. But almost all of that growth has been along the coast in the central and northern part of the country, where the government has made significant investments or worked to obtain private investment. As one commentator recently pointed out, the difference in economic wellbeing between Lima and Huancavelica (the poorest district) is the same as the difference between Norway and Nigeria.

A second reason is that the Garcia government is finally starting to implement a move toward decentralization of the government, responding to the decades-long demands of regional governments for more autonomy. But the regional governments are not accustomed to accepting responsibility for their own destiny and hence often blame the central government in Lima when things go bad.

Another factor is that the government has recently given more attention to the areas where protests have occurred, sending the prime minister or one of his cronies to have talks with the groups behind the protests. As one of the marchers said, with tires burning in the background blocking a highway, ¨The only signals this government seems to respond to are smoke signals.¨

I´m glad that I don´t have any travel plans for the immediate future, because many of these strikes will block major transportation routes. And one of the groups planning a four day strike starting July 16 is the airport workers union.

Googling the Earth With Lucy´s Kids

2007-06-26T09:22:00.000-07:00

On Father´s Day weekend I went to Lurín with Lucy and Walter (and Marcos and Lourdes, two other volunteers) to help them with their educational program for kids. They always have a planned lesson for each of the workshops that they teach to the kids and their parents, on themes such as leadership, assertiveness, surviving adolescence, etc. But there´s a two-hour slot with each group of kids called ¨Game Club¨, during which they usually play games that have been donated by volunteers and visitors. (Twister was a very popular one while it lasted, but the floor mat quickly disintegrated because of the rough dirt floor).

So when I visit the group, I usually take charge of Game Club time to teach the kids something new and interesting that they would not otherwise have an opportunity to learn. In the past I´ve taught them Sudoku, some magic tricks, how to make balloon animals, etc. This time I brought my laptop with me and showed them Google Earth. First we talked about satellites and the different purposes they serve. Then we turned on the computer and began our descent into South America, Peru, Lima and then Lurín, with the kids helping me to identify landmarks along the way. They were awed by the fact that they could see their own individual houses, and ¨fly¨ over the dunes that stand nearby. Some noticed that the photographs were several years old, and pointed out changes that had taken place in their neighborhood since they were taken.

Afterwards the kids presented Walter and Marcos and me with a cake that they had baked for us. Later we went to one of the internet cafes down the street and installed Google Earth on two of the computers there so that they could continue to explore.

Buying Jeans in Lima

2007-06-26T08:56:00.000-07:00

I had a feeling that it would be difficult to find pants in my size (W34 L34), since the average Peruvian is about a foot shorter than me. So I went first to the largest department stores, figuring that they would have the largest selection. The first thing that I noticed was that there was only one size printed on each of the labels. I asked one of the attendants whether it was the waist size or the length. ¨The waist size.¨ Not wanting to appear the stupid gringo, I read the labels carefully for several different brands, trying to decipher the coded information that surely must include the length. But I couldn´t find any number that could possibly be the length.

I selected a pair of size 34 Lee jeans that I liked and took them to the same attendant to ask her what the length was. Without even glancing at the pants, she replied, ¨32¨. I scanned the label again, and couldn´t find a ¨32¨ anywhere. Dumbfounded, I asked her, ¨How do you know?¨. ¨They´re all 32¨, she replied.

And so it is in Peru. You can buy any waist size you want, but unless you want to pay more than $50 for jeans imported from the US, the length is always 32. That´s more than enough length for 95% of the customers, and it costs less than a dollar to have someone tailor them to your preferred length. So it doesn´t make economic sense for the stores to order and manage lots of different sizes when they can get a better price ordering larger lots of fewer sizes.

A few days later I went to the huge clothing market in the district of Gamarra, and after asking half a dozen people where to find extra long jeans, I finally found two pairs of jeans with a 33 inch length for less than $20 each, one of them in an off-the-street backroom store that sells Chinese imitations of American brands, and the other at a Chilean import store. After paying a lady at the market 90 cents to let the hems down, they fit me as well as my American-bought jeans.

Break For Graduation and Wedding

2007-06-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

I went back to Indiana for most of the month of May to attend my daughter Marta´s graduation and my son Dan´s wedding. (Chris and Eric, my other two sons, are at the far right of the wedding picture). It was a short trip, but I was able to spend quite a bit of time with them and enjoy some really hot weather for a change. One of the highlights of the wedding celebration was the ¨after party¨. When the reception finished around 10:30 my kids and their significant others and I went in search of a bar to continue celebrating. Since Greencastle is a three bar town, we felt very lucky to find one that stayed open until 3:00 am, and a karaoke bar no less! You could choose pretty much any song as long as it was either a country tune or more than 20 years old. Chris´s wife Anne and I sang ¨Leavin´ On a Jet Plane¨.

I also made a short trip to visit my friend Larry Winiarski in Oregon, to help him with the construction of the aquaflector and to see it close up. We didn´t get as far as we had hoped (an actual test of its output) because it rained most of the time I was there.

I learned that Larry had converted his van to run on filtered used vegetable oil (discarded from restaurants that make deep fried food). It seemed to run very well on the free fuel, the only tricks necessary being the need to start the engine on regular diesel fuel, and the use of a heat exchanger to warm the oil before it is injected into the engine.

The Ciclovía

2007-04-30T08:42:00.000-07:00

From what I´m told by people here in Chorrillos, their mayor is a pretty good one. He hasn´t been seriously accused of corruption, and has been reelected twice. And every once in a while he has a really good idea, but sometimes the execution is a little lacking -- like the Ciclovía (cycle path) that was recently put into place. Traffic is heavy in most parts of the city from dawn to dusk, and lots of bicyclists have been killed by careless drivers. So a separate traffic lane for bicycles could have a big impact on safety and encourage more people to use bicycles, reducing auto traffic.

The Ciclovía in Chorrillos is similar to what a lot of North American cities have done, reserving a space in the public thoroughfares exclusively for bicycles. And in some areas where the road was recently widened, it was implemented very effectively. But for the most part it just consists of a couple of yellow stripes painted on top of whatever was already there. And human nature being what it is, it´s hard to imagine that the mototaxis that have always parked on a certain street, or the pedestrians who fill the sidewalk at one of the busiest bus stops in the city, are going to pay much attention to the new yellow lines. So while there will undoubtedly be a reduction in the number of bicyclists run over by vehicles, there will probably be an increase in the number of pedestrians run over by bicycles. I suppose it´s a good tradeoff.

The Aquaflector

2007-04-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

I´ve assembled a small scale model of the water pasteurization system that we hope to test in June or July. I´m trying to identify an organization that has experience with other water projects and has a presence in a sunny rural area where we can install it. My friend Larry Winiarski Jr. (whose father invented many of the stove and oven designs that I´ve been implementing) has invented a way to make a very inexpensive solar concentrator using strips of aluminized mylar stretched tightly in metal frames, and ganged together to track the sun. It could just as well be used as an economical way to increase the output of a solar electricity generator, which is the application he originally had in mind for it.

My contribution to the design is a yet-to-be-proven control system that uses an odd-shaped bucket of water with a slow leak, where a floating weight tied to the control arm falls at a varying velocity during the day to precisely follow the motion of the sun. (I haven´t yet calculated the exact shape of the bucket required, but it´s represented in the model by a sort of diamond shaped bucket, which is a very rough approximation of the needed shape).

This device takes advantage of the fact that purification of water doesn´t require boiling, but only pasteurization. That is, as long as the temperature is held at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, all of the dangerous bacteria and viruses will be killed. The amount of time varies inversely with the temperature, but the absolute minimum is 65 degrees C, at which pasteurization requires about 30 minutes. Raising the temperature of water from room temperature to 65 degrees C requires only half as much energy as boiling the water! But holding it at that temperature requires either the expenditure of more energy or the use of a well insulated container.

In the aquaflector system (so named by Larry), the untreated water enters one end of a shallow, wide heating duct that is suspended about 4 meters above the ground. The top of the duct is covered with insulation, and the reflectors concentrate the sunlight on the bottom of the duct to heat the water. At the far end of the duct is an exit pipe with an automotive thermostat (the little red thing between the water duct and the retention tank) that opens at 71 degrees C. The heated water enters an insulated retention tank that has been sized to hold about half an hour´s output, and the bottom of the tank contains an exit pipe connected to a float valve so that when the tank is full, the coolest, densest water (which has spent the most time in the tank) is released for use.

A further improvement to the design which I haven´t yet reflected in the model is the use of a heat exchanger to improve the efficiency of the system. ¨Waste heat¨ from the treated water will be used to preheat the untreated water, increasing the output of the system by a factor of two or three.

Relleno picado -- a very Peruvian dish

2007-04-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

Sonia has been teaching me to cook some new dishes lately, like guiso de calabacín (a delicious squash stew), estofado de pollo (a juicy chicken dish with large chunks of potato and a variety of other vegetables) and most recently, something called relleno picado (chopped blood sausage) that seems to combine a lot of the elements that are typical of Peruvian cuisine. The final product doesn´t look very interesting, so I´ve only captured a photo of the ingredients. But it doesn´t matter since you normally eat it as a sandwich filling.

The ingredients are:

a blood sausage called relleno (which is hard to find here in Lima, but Sonia knows a lady from Chincha who brings it to a market near my apartment once a week). It´s wrapped in a real intestine like old fashioned sausages, and sometimes contains rice.
a hot pepper called aji amarillo which is used in just about every Peruvian dish that is spicy

an onion (Peruvians prefer red ones for almost everything)

a couple cloves of garlic (essential for almost any Peruvian food -- even for plain white rice that you´re serving as a side dish)

a bunch of spearmint leaves (also very common in Peruvian cooking)

You just chop everything finely and fry it together. It´s hard to describe the flavor. The mint is a nice complement to the other flavors. It´s really tasty!

Water For San Genaro -- part 5

2007-04-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

I went to San Genaro last weekend to see how the neighbors are getting along with their new water resource. Freddy invited me and Sonia to eat lunch with his family, and told me that so far their monthly water bills have been much lower than we anticipated. Each family has had to pay a grand total of $1.60 for the first two months of usage. That´s about a tenth of what they used to pay! Unfortunately there are a few neighbors who don´t like the idea that someone else might receive more savings than themselves, and are insisting that people pay for the amount of time that they use the water rather than just splitting the bill evenly each month. But monitoring the amount of time each family uses would take a extraordinary amount of effort for the small improvement in ¨fairness¨.

Now that the neighbors have one success under their belt, they´re meeting every month to discuss other ways to improve their neighborhood. Lately, discussion has turned toward the construction of an illegal connection to the sewer system! I told Freddy that I thought it was a very bad idea and that it would leave them liable to severe penalties if it were discovered. But I was encouraged by the fact that the neighbors are realizing that they can accomplish more when they organize themselves. I guess empowerment has its good side and its bad side.

Getting Around Lima

2007-03-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

It´s usually very easy to get around Lima, except when one or more of the transport workers associations calls a general strike, like today. Almost everyone uses public transportation, since only the upper middle class owns cars.

You have four or five choices in public transportation within the city, depending on when you´re leaving from and how far you plan to go. Naturally there are lots of taxis, and these are the most expensive and (usually) most comfortable option. But lately there has been an increase in kidnappings by phony taxistas, who ransom their captives to earn a living. So I generally avoid taxis unless I´m in a really big hurry to get somewhere, or unless I know the driver.

If you´re just hauling a lot of groceries from the market and don´t want to carry them home on foot, you can take a moto, which is a motorcycle converted into a two passenger taxi. I´m told that it is a Peruvian invention. Since these are relatively slow vehicles, they don´t venture very far outside the neighborhood, except in rural areas where they are sometimes the only option.

If you want the comfort of a taxi but not the expense, you might be able to take a collectivo, depending on where you´re going. These are regular taxi cabs that travel fixed routes in the busiest areas, and charge a lot less than a taxi and about double what the buses charge. So if you are willing to walk a couple of blocks to a location where they pass by, this is often a very good choice, especially if you are in a hurry. Once they fill up with four passengers, they don´t make any stops until someone wants to get off.

At the opposite end of the expense/comfort spectrum are the combis, no larger than an extended minivan, which generally have three rows of seats behind the cab, plus a row of thin seats facing the opposite direction just behind the cab. When all the seats are full, they continue to stop for any potential passenger and try to stuff as many extra people in as possible. But they´re the cheapest way to get around.

On some routes there are full-size or medium-size buses. These are usually more comfortable than the combis and charge about the same. So they´re always preferable to a combi when one is available.

Interurban routes are served by three different classes of buses. The least expensive are crowded and offer no services. The tourist class buses have lots of leg room and generally have a toilet. They sometimes have two levels, with seats that convert to beds in the bottom level. The most expensive class of buses have air conditioning and heating. As far as I can tell, none of the drivers observe the speed limits or the double yellow lines on the highway.

I think one of the most difficult jobs in Lima is that of the cobrador, the driver´s assistant on a bus or combi who tells the driver when someone wants to get on or off, collects the fares, makes change, keeps track of who has paid and who hasn´t, and throws people off the bus when they become unruly or attempt to steal from someone.

Summer in Lima -- ¡Qué calor!

2007-03-14T09:06:00.000-07:00

I´m back in Peru again, and this is the first time I´ve spent part of the summer in Lima. The temperature doesn´t get extremely high -- only the mid-80s -- but with the near-100% humidity and lack of wind, the heat is hard to get used to. Some other things that I have trouble adjusting to every time I return:

pollution -- as usual I developed a respiratory infection the first week I was here.
noise -- Saturday nights are usually sleepless nights because there´s almost always an all night party within earshot
water -- bathing with 7 liters of water (the capacity of my solar heater)
dust -- leaving a window open on a windy day (a necessity during summer) means having to sweep the floor the next day.

The one thing that I always seem to adapt to rapidly is the food. I love the many creative ways they use potatoes, and I especially like the variety of the fruits, many of which we don´t have in the states, like maracuyá, lúcuma and guanabana.

I´ll be here until May, laying the groundwork for some projects that won´t get into full swing until June and July. After attending my daughter´s graduation and my son´s wedding, I´ll return at the end of May. This year we have another group of Canadian students from Global Youth coming to Peru, and they´ll be spending a week here in Lima and another week working with my friend Ernesto in Cai Cay to complete the adobe building that will house his educational center. In July, two students from the University of Dayton will join me for several months to help me with my investigations of efficiency improvements for gas stoves and of a new solar device for water purification that we will be installing for the first time anywhere in the world.

Water For San Genaro -- part 4

2006-12-20T18:29:00.000-08:00

We finally jumped through the last two hoops of the bureaucratic procedures for establishing a public water access in San Genaro. The water utility required that we obtain written permission from the municipality to block the road for the period of time necessary to make the connection. The municipality chose to approve it for the period December 18 to 22, so unfortunately I won´t be around for the inauguration and celebration. But Freddy invited me and some of the neighbors to his house for dinner a few days ago, and they presented me with a little gift for my efforts -- a retablo (a Nativity scene in three parts, enclosed in a wooden box).

The dinner was pachamanca, a meal traditionally prepared in the ground over heated stones, with the food wrapped in banana leaves to protect it from the dirt and retain the juices. It usually consists of three kinds of marinated meat, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn and fava beans.

Your Contributions Are Needed

2006-12-10T09:06:00.000-08:00

The longer I work here, the more firmly I become convinced that donating things to people (whether food, housing, or whatever) is the wrong way to help the poor. In fact, it´s counter-productive because it simply maintains a cycle of dependency. People become accustomed to receiving things and begin to feel that because they´re poor they have a right to handouts. Worse, they begin to believe that the solution to their problems is not within their own power, that they must depend on others to ¨fix¨ the situation in which they find themselves.

I think that those of us who are lucky enough to have been born into a country with great wealth have a moral duty to share our wealth with others who are less fortunate, but we should do it not by sharing our cash, but by sharing our knowledge: teaching them to create their own wealth -- teaching them to fish, rather than giving them fish.

Energy-saving technologies are money-saving technologies. They have the potential to create wealth, and quickly. Not a lot of wealth, but enough to make a significant difference in the lives of the poorest. For someone who lives from day to day without stable employment (about a quarter of the population of Lima) and sometimes has to decide between buying food or paying the electric bill on time, it can mean having enough money to do both. But it will take time and dedicated effort to teach people how to use these technologies, to overcome their resistance and to convince them that a small investment that is within their means will produce a savings many times greater, which they can use to improve the nutrition of their family or buy the materials that their children need for school.

My friend Martin (an anthropologist) and I have formed a team to continue disseminating the ¨retained heat cooking¨ technology that we have found to be successful in significantly reducing the use of gas in the preparation of meals at the women´s club in Pamplona. We are going to adopt two more women´s clubs in Chorrillos (closer to where I live) and perform more rigorous studies of the benefits and the problems with acceptance of the technology. Ultimately the use of these retained heat cookers can be self'-financing since the energy savings quickly pays for the initial cost of the device, and there is virtually no maintenance cost. But during this start-up phase we need to buy materials to construct various prototypes, buy gas and other combustibles to conduct our experiments, and pay the bus fare of some of the volunteers.

So far I´ve been financing this work out of my own pocket, but I know that some of you are interested in helping out, and since we´re approaching the end of the year I suspect that some of you are planning charitable contributions to reduce your tax burden. You can send your contribution by check to Una Familia, whose temporary address is 6440 Harbridge Road, Indianapolis, Indiana 46220. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so all contributions are tax deductible. I can promise you that your donation will not be used to pay salaries (all of us are volunteers). It will provide us with the materials we need to do our work, and reimburse the cost of transportation for those volunteers who could not afford to help us if they had to pay it themselves. And of course I´ll continue to keep you updated on the things that we accomplish together.

Day Trip To Chincha

2006-12-10T08:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Sonia and I took a bus to Chincha, a town about three hours south of Lima in a fertile valley where there are many vineyards, some nice beaches, an archeological site, and a very large and interesting market. We had time to visit everything except the vineyards. In the market we found huge freshly caught shrimp selling for less than $3 per pound. But since I didn´t have any way to keep it cold for the rest of the trip, I didn´t buy any. Next time I´ll come prepared!

The typical food of this area is sopa seca (literally ¨dried soup¨), which consists of a mixture of dried potatoes and fresh potatoes cooked in a peppery sauce, and a helping of spaghetti coated with ground basil.

Class On Solar Water Heaters

2006-12-10T08:34:00.000-08:00

The second class of the technology workshop took place on Thursday. We talked about the principles of heat transfer underlying the operation of a solar water heater, and some possible uses such as water for bathing, cooking and cleaning, as well as purification of water. Then we divided up the six students into two teams and each team built their own solar water heater.

Inauguration of Technology Workshop

2006-12-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

I decided a few weeks ago to set up a small research and development workshop so that volunteers could carry on developing the energy- and money- saving technologies that I´ve been working on. Miguel, my landlord, graciously agreed to let me use part of the big room below my apartment that was being used for storage. I´ve been outfitting it with tools and equipment for working with wood, metal, styrofoam, etc., and instruments for conducting experiments, like a gas flowmeter, balance and thermometer. Yesterday we had the formal opening of the workshop with a half-day class. Only about half of the people who said they were interested in attending actually showed up, but there were at least two, Lucy and Olivia, who are planning to volunteer in the workshop. And the fact that they are women makes them more valuable in the role of disseminating information, since most of our potential users are women, and men are regarded as knowing nothing about cooking.

Several other friends are donating their labor to help build workbenches, shelves, etc. The mission of the workshop, which we´ve named Centro de Investigaciones en Tecnología Ahorradora -- Research Center for Saving Technology -- is to develop, implement, test and disseminate low-cost technologies that conserve energy (hence money) and are applicable to the needs of the poorest members of society.

Women´s Club in Pamplona -- part 2

2006-11-20T18:44:00.000-08:00

I´ve spent the past several weeks designing a couple versions of a retained heat cooker (RHC) -- an inexpensive device that cooks food by retaining the heat that has been stored in the food after boiling it for a very short period of time. Essentially it´s just an insulated and sealed box or bag or basket. It takes up to twice as long to cook some foods, like beans or whole potatoes, but no fuel is consumed during the cooking process, the food can´t be burned by an inattentive cook, the kids can´t burn their hands on the pot or the fire, and the cook can leave the kitchen and go do something productive while the food is cooking.

The first RHC that I designed was for the women´s club, where they cook for 120 people every day. It´s a big plywood box in two parts, with 4 inches of styrofoam walls and a reflective plastic lining. It had to be rugged to survive daily use with pots of food weighing more than 100 pounds. Last week I installed it and trained them to use it. They´re now using it daily to cook about 40 pounds of rice. After bringing the rice to a boil for 5 minutes, they lift the pot into the RHC (luckily, it's a pot with four handles, because it takes more than two people to lift it!) They leave it for two hours, and the rice is done. At that time it´s still at 199 degrees F, so it stays nice and hot even if the rest of the meal isn´t ready for another hour or more. The women say that the rice is more evenly cooked than when they cook it over the gas stove. They proudly show off their new tool to all of the customers who come to buy their meals.

Several of the women and some of my neighbors asked me to design a smaller version for use in their homes, so I´ve built a much cheaper version from just styrofoam slabs and a plastic liner. The cost of materials is about $8, so someone could earn a living making a couple of them each day and selling them for $12 each.

Water for San Genaro -- part 3

2006-11-20T18:09:00.000-08:00

I had another meeting with the neighbors on Wednesday and told them that SEDAPAL had approved the installation of the pilón. I brought a long two notebooks, one for recording meeting minutes and decisions and another for accounting, and told them the time had come for them to take ownership of the project and form a committee to administer it. They elected a president, treasurer, secretary and a vocal (whose only responsibility apparently is to call together the neighbors when they need to have a meeting).

They quickly put together an estimate of about $100 in materials that would be needed to bury a pipe from Fredi´s house to the control point where SEDAPAL will install the connection, about 100 meters away. Each family agreed to contribute their share for materials and to help dig the trenches on Sunday morning at 6:00 am. I arrived around 7:30 to take some pictures. By 11:00 they had finished everything except the installation of the faucet and a brick enclosure to protect it. They decided to hire an albañil (professional craftsman) to do that work. We expect that sometime this week SEDAPAL will turn on the water, and we´ll inaugurate the pilón by breaking a bottle of champagne over it.

My First Publication In Peru

2006-11-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

I´ve been taking photos and writing design documents in Spanish for all of the various devices that I´ve created (most of them adapted from other people´s inventions) so that anyone can build them. And after Sonia corrects my grammatical errors, I´m planning to publish them in a couple of places on the internet where ¨stove geeks¨ like me hang out.

Recently I noticed that one of the newspapers in Lima frequently publishes designs for wood-burning ovens and ideas for starting businesses or saving money. They even published a design for a biogas generator using guinea pig poop! So I emailed them the design for my solar water heater about a month ago. Since they never responded, I figured they weren´t interested. Then today my landlord showed me the front page of the newspaper, and there was my picture of the solar water heater on my roof! On page seven they published the steps for building it. The rest of the article (list of materials, principle of operation, suggestions for adapting the design) will be published tomorrow.

Birthday Parties

2006-10-31T17:27:00.000-08:00

I got to celebrate my birthday twice this year! Once on Saturday with the kids at Lucy´s project, and again on Sunday with Sonia and our friends. Sonia and her friend Malena cooked pollo al sillao(chicken with soy sauce, ginger and garlic), rice with raisins and nuts, and potatoes. And the birthday cake had fillings of manjar blanco (caramel paste) and guanabana (a fruit). In Peru they always sing Happy Birthday in English, with a very bad accent (¨hoppy beerthday ...¨), then they sing Feliz Cumpleaños.

Water For San Genaro -- part 2

2006-10-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

After gathering all of the necessary documents to present our proposal to the water utility, SEDAPAL, we held a meeting for all of the neighbors who will be able to use the new water source, to explain what we´re planning to do and to gather their signatures. All of the people who showed up signed the proposal, and Fredi will continue to collect the remaining signatures so that we can deliver it on Wednesday. Supposedly we should get a response from SEDAPAL within just a few days, telling us what the cost will be.

The municipal elections are coming up in just a couple of weeks, and the walls of most of the houses on the hills of San Genaro have been transformed into campaign billboards. Almost all of them display the name of the incumbent mayor, Miyashiro, who is probably spending city funds and using city workers to paint the ads.

The Language of the Incas

2006-10-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

It´s a shame that none of the pre-Incan civilizations nor the Incas themselves had a written language. The Incas did succeed in imposing a common spoken language, Quechua, on most of their empire, which stretched from Argentina to Colombia. But many of the advanced techniques of construction, metallurgy and agriculture that they and their predecessors developed have been lost. The little that we know with any certainty about the Incas comes from oral histories which were captured in Spanish by the conquistadors.
Because Quechua is spoken only in countries where Spanish has become the predominant language, almost all of the resources for learning the language are written in Spanish. So to learn Quechua well you must first learn Spanish. I´ve been sitting in on an introductory Quechua course at San Marcos University, and it´s a fascinating language. It has an alphabet of only 16 consonants and 3 vowels -- depending on how you count them, and who´s version of written Quechua you use. There´s no b, c, d, e, f, g, o, v, x or z. The various Spanish linguists who developed written forms of the language use slightly different notations, but all add the Spanish letters ch and ñ. Five of the consonants, ch, k, p, q and t, have three variations each. One variation has an extra puff of air when it is voiced, and another has a brief stoppage of air following the consonant. One of the big challenges is tuning your ear to hear the differences between these variations.
Verbs take different endings to distinguish person and plurality, as in Spanish, but there are fewer tenses and all verbs are regular -- no exceptions to remember! Nouns have conjugations as in Latin. The biggest difference between Quechua and other languages (at least the ones I´ve been exposed to) is the extensive use of word endings to add information content that is independent of the meaning being conveyed. For example, there are endings that mean ¨I know this to be true¨, ¨I´m referring to something that you just said¨, ¨and also¨, etc. In all there are eleven different endings, with as many as five strung together at the end of a word. But the stress (with very few exceptions) is always on the second-last syllable. So the most difficult part for me in listening to Quechua has been separating the base word from the endings. If you´re interested in knowing what the language looks like or sounds like, here´s a site that has a lot of information: www.andes.org.

Women´s Club in Pamplona - part 1

2006-10-20T09:47:00.000-07:00

One of the best organized forces for helping to alleviate poverty in Peru are the Clubes de Madres, tens of thousands of small groups of women who get together every weekday to cook a big meal and distribute it to their neighbors at cost. Those who work in the kitchen receive free meals for their families, and certain other people who are disabled or have recently given birth are also exempted from payment. The clubs are partially supported by the government with free rice, and occasionally some beans or canned fish. But they have to pay for their own rent and other expenses. One of the biggest expenses is fuel for cooking.
A friend of mine, Martín, who recently graduated from San Marcos University, is serving as a teaching assistant for an anthropology class that decided to do a project investigating a women´s club in Pamplona, a community in southern Lima that sits high above the rest of the city. Martín knew of my interest in building energy-saving devices and asked if I could help them come up with ways to conserve fuel. They currently spend almost $20 per week on gas for cooking, which represents a large percentage of their variable costs. If they could achieve substantial savings on gas, they could afford to cook more nutritious meals, containing more meat and green vegetables. Or they could afford to buy the materials to build an oven, which would allow them to expand their offerings to generate more income.
A few days ago I spent a morning with six women at their comedor watching everything they do to prepare the meal, to get some ideas about what interventions help them to reduce gas consumption. They started out with these ingredients:

33 pounds of potatoes
44 pounds of olluco (similar to potatoes)
33 pounds of rice
7 pounds of pumpkin
7 pounds of onions
7 pounds of sémola (wheat-based thickener)
3 pounds of carrots
2 pounds of tomatoes
2 pounds of garlic
9 pounds of chicken feet
1 whole chicken (7 pounds)

They spent most of the four hours peeling and chopping the olluco and potatoes, and one woman spent more than an hour picking through the rice to remove impurities. They cooked in three huge pots. In one they made a soup of the chicken feet, pumpkin, carrots, and spinach. In another they cooked the rice after sauteing some garlic. In the last they cooked the chicken with onions and spices, and then added the olluco and potatoes. It was delicious, but not very nutritious, consisting almost entirely of carbohydrates and fat. Imagine serving more than 100 people with a main dish made from one chicken!

Based on what I observed, I think that placing a ¨pot skirt¨ of galvanized steel around the pots while they cook would help to conserve heat and reduce gas use, and using a ¨retained heat cooker¨ (essentially a box lined with styrofoam) after bringing the rice to a boil would allow the rice to finish cooking without consuming gas. I´ll start to build these next week after the students finish their initial interviews with the women.

We´re Eating WHAT???

2006-10-05T20:48:00.000-07:00

Peruvian food varies greatly from one region to another. This isn´t surprising since Peru has more biodiversity than any other country in the world. Of the 104 different types of ¨life zones¨ that exist on Earth, 84 are found in Peru. Generally, on the coast you encounter more food containing fish, in the mountains more potatoes, lamb and pork, and in the jungle more fruit and vegetables. Very little of the food is spicy, but a hot pepper sauce is often offered ¨on the side¨.

One of the striking things about Peruvian food is the extensive use of organ meats. They don´t let anything go to waste here! So far I´ve tasted the following body parts in one or more forms: beef heart, lung and stomach, lamb testicle, chicken gizzard and fish head. I´ve also seen sheep heads and chicken feet for sale in the market, but haven´t yet had the pleasure of tasting any preparations that use them.

I really like the heart, which is served shish kebab style and called anticucho. I´d have to say the lung was my least favorite. It´s really hard to chew, so you pretty much have to swallow it as it is. (Fortunately they cut it in tiny pieces). The testicle wasn´t bad -- until they told me what it was!

So what is that stuff in the picture above that vaguely resembles meat? It´s a dish that you can find being prepared over a grill on just about any street corner on a weekend night, called combinado - a combination of chicken gizzards and cow stomachs, with lots of seasoning, served over boiled potatoes. The stomach is really quite tasty and tender!

Water For San Genaro II - Part 1

2006-10-03T10:11:00.000-07:00

This is how a family typically stores water in San Genaro II (the upper part of the hill that forms the ¨human settlement¨ known as San Genaro) - using an odd collection of tubs and garbage cans with some sort of cover to keep the dirt out. This community was organized as a legal entity more than eight years ago, but there are still only a handful of houses that have connections to the public water supply, and just one ¨public¨ connection shared by 20 families who occupy one block.

When the Canadian teachers left after their reconstruction project here, some of them were interested in donating money to help with the other problems, besides housing, that face the people here. They were particularly moved by the fact that most of the people in San Genaro II had to pay more the double the usual cost of water because the only way to obtain it was to pay a downhill neighbor, who had a connection to the water supply, to let them fill their containers using a hose. The typical charge is more than $3 per hour of use (just about enough time to fill all of the containers in their house), and a family usually needs to fill their containers a couple of times each week. A private connection to the city water supply costs more than $300.

I told the Canadians that I had been interested in doing a ¨microcredit¨ project where a group of families would finance the installation of a shared water access point using the savings that they would realize on the cost of the water. They agreed to donate the money for the installation. A group of friends from Lilly who participated in a Spanish class that I taught are providing the funding for the paperwork and other miscellaneous expenses. So lately I´ve been spending a lot of time visiting with Freddy (one of the residents in San Genaro II who´s going to represent the group of neighbors), SEDAPAL (the water utility) and SUNARP (the public documents registry) trying to understand and compile all of the documents that we need to present just to perform the first step: a feasibility study that will determine the cost of the installation. Tomorrow we should have everything we need except for a cover letter from the directiva of San Genaro II authorizing the project.

The plan is to get each of the 24 neighbors on Freddy´s block to agree to buy their water from an access point that we will install, and to pay 1/12 of the water bill each month. In this way we will collect twice the amount of the water bill each month, and put the excess into a fund that will pay off the cost of the installation and generate money for another installation on another block. When the second installation has been financed, the neighbors can stop subsidizing the installations and just split the water bill each month. But even during the period of subsidization, we estimate that they will see at least a 30% reduction in their expenditures for water. Over time we should be able to provide cheaper water to everyone in San Genaro II. There are still a few details to work out, like buying and replacing hoses, and what to do in the case of nonpayment, but we´re optimistic that we can work through those.

Wood-Burning Oven

2006-09-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

I´ve really missed being able to bake my own bread since I got here. The LPG gas stove that I borrowed from friends doesn´t have an oven, and anyway a gas oven would be very expensive to operate. So I´ve been working on building a wood-burning oven using some recycled barrels. The design is from Aprovecho Research Institute, a group that also designed the wood-burning stoves that I used to build in Central America.

The oven consists of one barrel within another, with holes in the bottom and top of the outer barrel for the smoke to enter and exit, and some baffles made of fiberglass insulation covered with aluminum foil that form a pathway for the smoke so that it makes contact with most of the surface of the barrel. That little white gadget on the door of the oven is a fancy digital thermometer that I brought with me from the U.S. I´m still looking for a cheap, simple dial-type thermometer to reduce the cost.

The oven still isn´t quite finished (it needs a layer of fiberglass insulation on the outside, covered by another barrel that is split on the side), but it´s far enough along for a test. Last weekend I baked a couple loaves of banana bread and served it to the neighbors.

This is the man from whom I rent my apartment, Miguel, who always lends me a hand with my experiments. Here he´s chopping wood to feed the fire.

Unfettered Capitalism

2006-09-26T18:56:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what capitalism would look like if you took away the worker protections imposed by governments like minimum wages, hours worked, age discrimination, and things like that? It would probably look a lot like what you find here in Peru, because none of those protections are enforced. The minimum wage is officially about US $140 per month, but people commonly earn as little as $80 a month working six days a week. And if they complain about it, they simply lose their job to someone else who is eager to have any job at all. If they miss a day of work for whatever reason, they´re often charged two days of pay. In other words, not only do they not get paid for that day, but they pay their employer a day´s wages for the inconvenience that he suffered.

There´s officially a work limit of 40 hours per week with extra compensation for overtime, but in practice you work for as many hours as your employer tells you to. And forget about overtime. You´re lucky if you get paid for all the hours that you work. My friend Freddy has quit his job twice because his employer kept delaying payment of what he was owed. But each time he has eventually gone back, without receiving all the pay he was entitled to, because it´s the only job he can find that he knows will provide some income every week.

If you´re over 30 years old and don´t hold a ¨permanent¨ job in the profession that you studied for, forget about ever finding one. There are plenty of younger unemployed people who don´t yet have families, willing to work for lower wages. I´ve had lots of interesting conversations with taxi drivers who used to work in industry or taught in the universities, but can´t find anyone who wants to hire them because of their age.

In Peru (like most other Latin American countries), capital rules. If you don´t have an excess of money, it´s almost impossible to join the small club of people who do. The rich families continue to get richer, and the poor continue to increase in numbers. According to the measures that capitalists like to use, Peru has one of the ¨healthiest¨ economies in the world, with a growth rate exceeding 5% for five years in a row. But during those five years the poverty rate has barely changed, and still hovers at around 50%.

The other day I heard a woman say that she would like to have a small business selling tamales, but didn´t have the capital to do it. She wasn´t talking about the money necessary to rent a space or to buy equipment. She meant that she couldn´t gather together the $20 or so that she would need to buy a large pot and enough ingredients to make a big batch of tamales in her home, so that she could go and sell them on the street.

Tómbola in Esquivel

2006-09-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend Sonia belongs to a group of lay people associated with an order of nuns based in Canada that has three convents in Lima, one of which is just a couple of blocks from where I live. The asociados get together every couple of weeks to organize small projects to help people in need. Last weekend some of us went to a tómbola that was organized by a group at another convent in Esquivel, north of Lima, to raise money for maintenance of the school that they operate there. A tómbola is sort of a random sale of donated items. People donate things ranging from sacks of sugar or rice to clothing to toys. Each item is assigned a number. Then they hire a band, cook a bunch of good food, organize games for the kids (like ¨fishing¨ for prizes, above), and entice people to come and buy the things that have been donated. For 30 cents you can draw a number and receive the prize associated with that number.

They were serving pachamanca, a dish that is baked underground in banana leaves and usually consists of pork, chicken, lamb, potatoes, sweet potatoes, fava beans and corn. Unfortunately this particular pachamanca included only pork and sweet potatoes, but is was pretty tasty.

This is Sister Gladys, the coordinator of our group of asociados, stirring a big pot of carapulcra, a dish that is made from dried potatoes, fresh potatoes, onions, pork, and a bunch of other good stuff. I think the sisters are going to be eating the leftovers for several weeks!

A Quick Trip To Ecuador

2006-09-09T13:34:00.000-07:00

Last week I made a quick run to the border to renew my visa. You have to leave the country for at least 24 hours every 90 days in order to remain ´legal´. From Lima it´s about the same distance to either Chile or Ecuador (about 19 hours) and Chile charges US citizens a $100 fee for an entry visa while Ecuador charges nothing. So I headed north hoping to escape from the winter for a few days. The tourist buses are very modern and comfortable. For $24 you get the best service, with food and drinks, movies, air conditioning. For ten dollars less you get the same comfortable seat, without the food and movies and air conditioning, but the bus stops in a lot more places en route, and even picks up or drops off people along the highway (including people who want to sell you tamales or tell you the sad story of their life and ask for money), so it takes a couple of hours longer and it´s a lot harder to sleep.
The northern coast of Peru is dotted with beach resorts but dominated by plantations of rice and bananas. Although it´s all desert and rains very little, the ground water in some places is just a few feet from the surface, so it´s economical to scrape off some sand and plant rice.
Most things are more expensive in Ecuador (about 50% more, from what I could tell in the short time I was there) but wages are also much higher, drawing many Peruvians to try to find work there, legally or not. Any citizen of an Andean nation can enter any other Andean nation with just a passport, but getting a work permit is difficult.
One of the few things that is much cheaper in Ecuador is gasoline, and people often try to bring it across the border, which is illegal (other than the gasoline in your gas tank). As we approached a customs check point on the way back, we saw agents board the bus in front of us and unload dozens of containers through the windows. When we pulled up for our inspection, we saw that they contained gasoline. I had to take these pictures from the window of our bus, because government workers are very camera-shy, especially with all the recent hidden camera videos that have been published showing officials in prisons and other institutions accepting bribes.

Feast of Santa Rosa

2006-08-31T14:53:00.000-07:00

August 30 is the feast of Saint Rose, the patron saint of Lima. It´s a holiday for anyone lucky enough to have a ¨real¨ job in the formal sector of the economy. There are hundreds of processions and festivals all over the city. This is a procession that passed down my street.

The most popular activity seems to be the one that takes place at the ¨wishing well¨ at the church of Santa Rosa near the center of town. It used to be a regular water well, but is now a dry hole where people come to write their petitions on a card and drop them into the well, hoping that Santa Rosa will answer their prayers.

It´s a very busy (and I suppose profitable) day for people selling the cards, pens, and all sorts of food to the hungry crowds. People had to stand in line for several hours to get to the well. (I didn´t, which is why I only have pictures of the crowds, and not the well.)

Three Homes In Three Days

2006-08-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

The Canadian teachers went home yesterday after spending three days with us helping to renovate a couple of houses. We divided them into two teams, and Sonia interpreted for one team and I for the other. It was Sonia´s first experience serving as an interpreter, and she did very well.
The teams worked very hard, and accomplished more than I expected, so that we were able to begin roofing a third house, which my friend Freddy and I finished the next day.
On the last day, we all went back to my neighborhood to eat lunch at a benefit for the family who lost their house to the fire.
And the team decided to donate a gas stove to one of the families that has eight children and was cooking its meals over a wooden fire.

Cómo Hacer Un Termo Solar

2006-08-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

(This is for my Spanish-speaking friends who want to know how to make a solar shower.)

Se puede hacer facilmente y baratamente un aparato que caliente agua por medio de la radiación solar, con suficiente capacidad para ducharse. Funciona bien aún en regiones constantamente nubladas como donde vive yo (Lima, Perú). El modelo ilustrado aquí me costó aproximadamente $30. Con materiales usados sale mucho más barato. Los materiales que usé son los siguientes, pero se puede adaptar el diseño a los materiales que se tiene a mano. Lo importante es que la superficie del termo sea grando en relación a la cantidad del agua, y que la capa sea de vidrio y no de plastico. (El vidrio refleja los rayos infrarojos generado en la caja, mientras que la mayoría de los plasticos no tienen esta propiedad.)

Una tabla delgada de madera, de un metro cuadrado
2 listones de 2 cm x 4 cm x 2 m
1 liston de 2 cm x 3,5 cm x 1 m
28 metros manguera de plastico de 3/4 pulgada
2 mangueras de largo suficiente para conectar el termo al chorro y a un recipiente
2 codos con el diametro de la manguera
4 abrazadores
uno o más pedazos de vidrio con área total de 96 cm
1 lata de pintura negra mate (spray)
pernos

Las fotos abajo enseñan el proceso.

Haz la base con la tabla y los dos listones de 2 x 4.

Forma un espiral de la manguera y asegurarlo con cinta y adjunta los codos a sus fines con abrazadores.

Mete la manguera en la caja de madera de tal manera que el fin del tubo más lejos del centro esté centrado en un lado de la caja. Corta un agujero de tamaño suficiente que el codo pase por el fondo de la caja. Corta el listón de 2 x 3,5 cm en pedazos y ubícalos en los lados de la caja para apoyar el vidrio.

Usa los pernos para asegurar la borde del espiral.

Pinta todo el interior de la caja con la pintura negra mate.

Conecta un chorro de agua al codo en el interior del espiral y asegúralo con abrazador. Conecta el otro codo a una manguera para sacar el agua caliente. (Puede ir a una cabeza de ducha, un balde o cualquiera. Pon el vidrio encima de la caja y asegúralo con pedados de madera. Instálalo en un techo o otro lugar expueso al sol, con la salida del agua más arriba de la entrada.

Una vez conectado, abre la llave hasta que el agua fría salga del aparato. Cierra la llave y esperar hasta que el agua caliente. Luego abre la llave otra vez para sacar el agua caliente.

Con manguera de 3/4 pulgada, cada metro tiene capacidad de aproximadamente 0,25 litro, así que este modelo tiene capacidad de 7 litros. En un día de bastante sol, este modelo levanta la temperatura del agua de 20 grados a 40 grados en una hora. En un día muy nublado con una temperatura ambiental de 19 grados (lo más común acá en Lima), la temperatura del agua en el termo alcanza 31 grados -- no muy caliente pero adecuada para ducharse cómodamente.

Cualquier mejoramiento que descubras, por favor comunícate conmigo a jimwilmes@hotmail.com.

La Señora Eufemia

2006-08-07T09:16:00.000-07:00

Eufemia is one of the señoras who helped us to make tamales the other day, and she´s one of the women whose house we´re going to be working on when a team of twelve Canadian teachers comes to visit this week. Her house is in pretty good condition compared to others in her neighborhood, but it´s small for her family and consists of just one big room. So we´re going to build some internal walls with doors, and add a small room on to the back of the house. These are some pictures of her house, and of her neighborhood.

We´re also going to make similar modifications to another house in the same neighborhood (San Genaro, about five minutes from where I live), owned by Señora Maria Luz, who has five children living with her. Her house is much more humble, with a dirt floor. I´ll be going there tomorrow with some friends to level the ground where we´ll be working, so that it´s ready for building when the Canadians arrive. They´ll be working with us from Thursday through Saturday, and then they´re going to San Juan Lurigancho to work with another project which teaches job skills to physically and mentally handicapped people in the most heavily populated district of Lima.

This is my friend Roger, a civil engineer who donates his time drawing up plans for us whenever we have building projects.

Making Tamales With The Señoras

2006-08-07T08:38:00.000-07:00

Sonia belongs to a group of people from her church who get together frequently to help out other people in need. They periodically make tamales or other things to raise money for their projects. On Friday we made tamales with the help of some señoras whom the group has helped in the past.

To make the masa, they soak dried corn overnight and grind it in a food processor, add some garlic, onion and ground peppers. Then they cook some diced chicken. These are wrapped in two or three corn husks with an olive and a strip of hot pepper. Then they´re tied with string and steamed for about an hour.

Altogether we made 112, in just a little over three hours. Mmmmmm, qué rico!

A Fire in the Neighborhood

2006-07-31T18:31:00.000-07:00

I heard a lot of sirens on Friday morning, but didn´t realize the fire trucks were just down the street on the block where I live. Apparently a short circuit started a fire in the house and it quickly engulfed the walls, which were made of esteras (woven grass mats) nailed to wooden posts. The family was asleep at the time, but fortunately all awoke and were able to escape.

On Saturday morning, Sonia and I joined about twenty-five members of the church that the family belongs to, digging through the rubble to find anything that could be salvaged and piling all of the debris in one area. When we started, it looked like a forest of burnt poles with wet burned trash everywhere. This is what it looked like after we finished. The part that Sonia and I worked on had lots of straw, and I asked her whether the family kept animals. ¨No¨, she said, ¨those were their mattresses.¨

About the only things that were salvageable were a few tools and a lot of sheet metal roofing. The family is temporarily living in a lot that is owned by some nuns.

Happy Independence Day!

2006-07-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

No, I´m not three weeks late. Peru celebrates its independence from Spain on July 28. For most of the people living in 1821, it was only a nominal independence that had no effect on their lives. The wealthy Spanish elite who controlled the country stopped paying taxes to Spain, but everyone else continued to be controlled by the Spanish elite.

In Peru (or at least here in Lima) you´re required to display the flag on Independence Day, and if you have a business you´re required to clean and paint the exterior. You can be fined for failing either obligation. So the city has become quite a bit more attractive during the past few weeks, and flags are visible everywhere.

There´s a big festival in the park across the street where I live, with lots of good food, some games and raffles. I´m heading there right now with some friends.

My New Place -- With A Hot Shower

2006-07-24T19:57:00.000-07:00

I´ve finally found an apartment with a large bedroom, a spacious dining room and a tiny kitchen, with a spiral staircase giving me access to the roof. Like most houses in Lima, it has no water heater. The property has a large yard where I can work on developing efficient stoves, ovens and other things that I´m interested in teaching people to produce and to use. And there´s even a large vacant room where I can hold classes.

The owner, Miguel, is seventy years old and a firm believer in lifelong learning. He´s been helping me to find components like recycled barrels for making ovens, and last week we put together a solar hot water shower and installed it on my roof. It consists of a 28-meter coil of 3/4 inch garden hose, painted flat black, beneath a sheet of glass, all encased in a plywood box. The innermost end of the coil is connected to the pipe where the faucet head used to be attached, and the outermost end of the coil is attached to the faucet head. When I open the shower valve, cold water is sent up to the heater, pushing the already heated water down into the shower.

We almost never have a clear day in Lima, especially during the winter (which is right now -- we´re in the southern hemisphere here). On a typical day when it´s about 60 degrees outside and you can´t make out where the sun is, the heater puts out water at about 90 degrees -- just adequate for a shower. On a day when you can see some shadows, the water gets up to 125 degrees. The coil holds only 7 liters of water, but it´s sufficient if you shut off the water while you´re lathering up and then turn it on again to rinse off. It cost about $30 to make using all new materials, but it could probably be made for $10 using recycled stuff.

Anniversary Celebration of Workshops

2006-07-12T10:21:00.000-07:00

This past weekend we celebrated the first anniversary of Lucy and Walter´s workshops with the mothers of the community of Guadulfo Silva in Lurín, a little town south of Lima. They travel two hours by bus every weekend to provide workshops for the children and their mothers (and a few fathers) about a wide range of topics, including assertiveness training, skills for couples, artesania, and many other things. We´re planning some new activities for the next two years that will include starting a business, perhaps a bakery.

To celebrate the anniversary, the children prepared some dances and skits, Sonia and I cooked aji de gallina, a creamy chicken sauce served over potatoes and lettuce, and some friends of Lucy and Walter played guitars and flutes and sang.

During the celebration, a parade happened to pass by. It appeared to be in honor of el Señor de los Milagros (Lord of the Miracles, one of the many representations of Christ), but included some brightly dressed scissors dancers, a traditional indigenous rite associated with devil worship in the mountains! The large wooden object being carried vertically is a harp.

Feast of Saints Peter and Paul

2006-07-05T11:04:00.000-07:00

June 29 is the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. It´s celebrated with huge festivals and parades in coastal communities like Chorrillos (where I live) because St. Peter is the patron saint of fisherman.

Vendors line the streets selling food, artesania and clothing. Some of the streets are closed to create a marketplace. On the pier, statues of St. Peter and the Virgin Mary await the procession that will take place in the afternoon. Many people come up and touch them.

Near the beach, people have gathered to watch a couple of street actors. Sonia recognizes one of them as someone who used to have a show on TV, which was canceled because it was considered to be in bad taste. They periodically pull people from the audience to participate in their skits. When I arrive, they call me Harry Potter and proceed to perform a skit about an American who is visiting Lima.

The parade is supposed to begin at 10:00, but at 11:30 we find the streets packed with people, and groups of uniformed participants still trying to organize themselves into a parade. Eventually the parade begins and the people give them enough space to pass. There are army reservists, nurses from a nearby hospital, and groups of students and teachers from all the local schools.

Shopping In Lima

2006-06-16T10:43:00.000-07:00

Lima is a huge city (about 7 million people) where the vast majority do not own a car, and public transportation expenses take up a significant chunk of their income. In contrast, almost everyone in the U.S. has a car and the expense associated with it is usually a minor part of personal income. In the U.S., businesses tend to be situated at a distance from other business that sell similar products (with a few exceptions, like restaurants). Here the businesses of one type tend to aggregate in the same area, because people are more likely to shop in an area where they can find lots of choices without spending extra time and money on transportation. When I recently went to shop for furniture, I found dozens of little furniture stores within a couple blocks of each other.

The huge majority of businesses in Peru are very small operations with just a few employees. They operate with very little capital, and their collection of merchandise may have a theme (like cleaning products or kitchen utensils), or it may just be a random collection of things that the owner thought he could sell at a profit. If one business seems to be having a lot of success with a particular item, others nearby may start selling it even if it has nothing to do with the other products that are being offered. For example, here´s a baby products store on a busy street.

In the same block, there is also a bicycle store, a furniture store and a mattress store. All three of them are now selling baby strollers in addition to the products that you would normally expect to find in their stores.

Unfortunately, some of the areas that offer the best selection of certain products are relatively unsafe. I recently went to buy a recycled stainless steel cylinder to build a stove, and was glad to have two friends with me because it didn´t look like a place where I would want to walk alone.

There are lots of ambulatory vendors in Lima who sell products or services. The knife sharpeners are my favorite. They pull a small apparatus that sits on top of a bicycle wheel, and when they stop in front of a home or restaurant to sharpen their knives, the bicycle wheel is operated to power their grinding wheel. They each have a high-pitched flute which they play to announce their presence in a neighborhood, so you always know when they´re passing by. I don´t know how they all ended up adopting the same ¨trademark¨ in a city so huge, but I´ve heard their flutes in lots of different parts of Lima, so I´m convinced that they all use them. Similarly, the trash collectors always bank on the side of their garbage truck with a hollow metal pipe when they come down the street.

Peru - A Country Without An Identity

2006-06-13T15:47:00.000-07:00

The most striking thing I´ve learned from my classes so far is that Peru is a country that doesn´t seem to have any sense of national identity. From the Spanish invasion in the 1500s, right up until the hacienda system (essentially a feudal system) was abolished in 1968, it has been occupied by two separate societies that didn´t intermix. And even among the indigenous peoples, there is so much diversity that one really can´t think of them as a single society.

There is also a great deal of distrust of the central government in Lima by the people who live in other parts of the country. History has taught them that Lima does whatever serves the interests of the rich people in Lima and the coastal cities, and ignores the needs of the rest of the country. When the national government finally began a significant effort to build highways from the coast to the interior of the country, it did so without any concern for where the population was located. The goal was simply to provide the shortest path to carry metals and minerals from the mines to the coast where they could be shipped abroad.

The regional and municipal governments sometimes do things in defiance of the central government. When the national government decided to go along with the U.S. policy of eradicating coca from Peru, several municipalities in the south whose population were going to be affected by the crackdown declared that coca is part of the patrimony of Peru, and its production cannot be banned.

Contributing to this identity crisis is a distrust among the different segments of society. The Spanish and mestizos in the large cities feel threatened by the huge immigration of indigenous people over the last 50 years, and the indigenous people in the Amazon region feel threatened by the people who have immigrated from the mountains to exploit the resources there by creating farms and cattle ranches. The experience of the Peruvian people over hundreds of years has been that if you trust someone, you will be exploited by them.

I´m often told by my friends here that I´m too confiado, that I trust people whom I don´t know well. I guess that´s because my experience living in North America has taught me that most people can be trusted, and don´t have any reason to harm me. I imagine that it will take a long time for the people here, whose experience is just the opposite, to be able to live together in harmony.

La Senora Teodosia

2006-06-13T15:32:00.000-07:00

I went to San Genaro with my girlfriend Sonia and her friend Lucia to visit a women´s cooperative that´s looking for help in locating a new place for their operations. Along the way we stopped to visit a woman I had met several years ago, who was the recipient of a house built by Sonia´s group of lay missionaries. Teodosia lives with her son Fermín near the top of the hill. Somehow they survive on her sales of popcorn and his work as a laborer, for which he is paid $30 per month. She can´t afford the $200 installation charge for an electric meter, so she has to buy her electricity from a neighbor for $8 per month -- a high price to pay for the single bare bulb that illuminates her living room.

On this afternoon she welcomed us and invited us to sit with her in her house, but she seemed distracted. Eventually she told us that her daughter, who lives in the mountains several hundred miles from Lima, was seriously ill. She had received a phone call from relatives a week ago saying that she should come right away, but it would cost $30 each way for the several dìfferent buses and taxis she would have to take to get there. She wanted to bring her daughter to Lima for treatment, because in the area where her daughter lives, the only medical care available is from the curanderos, who have a good knowledge of effective herbal treatments but a poor ability to diagnose many illnesses. Someone had offered her a loan of $15, but she had no way to repay it. We took up a collection among Sonia´s group and were able to give Teodosia enough money for her travels. I´ll check back in a week or so to find out how her daughter is doing.

Where I Live

2006-06-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

I´ve rented a small room on the fourth floor of a family house, just across the street from the Lima Sur shopping plaza in Chorrillos, a district in the southern part of Lima. Water is rationed here, and usually lasts from early in the morning till about 6:00 at night. There are three rooms on my floor that share a common bathroom (no hot water). Mine is about two by three meters -- just big enough for a mattress, a clothes closet and some space to store my bags. The floor is concrete and the roof is corrugated plastic, so it gets chilly at night. My friends Lucy and Walter loaned me an inflatable mattress that I´m going to use until I find a more ¨permanent¨ place. But I can´t complain about the price: $46 per month -- including utilities!

From the roof of my building, looking in one direction I can see two hills, San Genaro and Armapampa, both of which were settled by squatters about twenty years ago. The houses are mostly patchwork assemblies of plywood, corrugated metal, plastic, cardboard and woven straw. Few of the them have access to water or sewer services. People either buy water from a truck that comes by every few days or from neighbors down below who have a city water supply and a hose long enough to reach their house. They store their water in large plastic containers. (You can imagine how much water a family would have to store to last a whole week.) In August I´ll be building a pre-fabricated house in San Genaro with a group of Canadian teachers.

Looking in the other direction I can see a gated community across the street from my house, with a beautiful little park surrounded by an iron fence with four entrances, each of them closed and padlocked. Living in this area gives me the sense that no one feels secure. Everyone who has a decent house lives behind at least two layers of locked doors.

My landlord assures me that at the end of the month I´ll be able to move into a larger apartment on the first floor with a small patio and enough room for a kitchen.

Learning More About Peru

2006-06-05T14:26:00.000-07:00

I decided to take a class offered by the Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas called Introduction to the Peruvian Reality. It started today and lasts three weeks. It´s oriented toward foreigners who are working in the area of social development in Peru. There are twenty of us in the class, and I think I´m the only student who isn´t associated with a religious order.

There was no electricity at the institute today because someone had stolen an electrical cable a block away. (It´s not uncommon for people to steal electrical or telephone cables and sell them as scrap metal.) So we weren´t able to view the PowerPoint presentations or videos, but I learned a lot about the early history of Peru. The Incas weren´t the ones who invented the impressive agricultural and architectural methods that we still admire today. (No, it wasn´t extraterrestrials, either.) They evolved over several thousand years and several different civilizations that preceded them.

A Week With Some Canadians in Cai Cay

2006-05-31T10:50:00.000-07:00

I just got back from Cusco, where I spent a week with a group of Canadian students involved in Global Youth Network (http://www.globalyouthnetwork.ca), which coordinates month-long trips to countries as diverse as Peru, Kenya and Burkina Faso for students who want to experience the reality of those countries from the perspective of the people who live there. They typically participate in lots of discussions and volunteer work In this case, I arranged for their participation in the construction of a community workshop at an Una Familia project in Cai Cay, a small town (population 1,000) about an hour from Cusco. We spent most of the week hauling adobe bricks by wheelbarrow from the field they were being produced up to the location where the workshop is being built. We managed to haul 850 of the 4,000 that were being produced, and the group generously donated $400 which should cover hauling the rest of the bricks and erecting the second story of the workshop.

I had lots of photos to share, but my backpack was stolen in the bus terminal as I was leaving Cusco, and I lost my camera, passport, and some other things. So it may be awhile before I post any more photos.

A Week in England With My Daughter

2006-05-15T07:40:00.000-07:00

I spent the first week of May visiting my daughter Marta, who´s spending a semester abroad at the University of Sussex. We spent most of the weekend traveling around the southern part of England.
This is Westminster Abbey, probably the most beautiful building I've seen in all of my travels.

This is the changing of guard at Buckingham Palace.
This is a building in Brighton built by one of the kings.

For me the highlight of the trip was a visit to the Eden Project, the largest plant conservatory in the world.

We also walked around the moors one day and visited a fourteenth century church that we found on top of a hill.

This is my daughter. She´s completely mastered dressing like a Brit, but still has some work to do on the accent.

Another Adventure in Latin America

2006-05-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

I´m taking one more step toward figuring out what I want to be when I grow up, spending about eight months in Peru working on various social development projects. The non-profit organization that I started four years ago, Una Familia, has been supporting three projects here, near Lima, Cusco and Trujillo. They are all very different, involving health, education and security, but what they all have in common is empowerment of people to create a better life for themselves and their children.

As many of you know, I´ve been trying for the last several years to make a transition from doing what I´m good at (software engineering) to doing what I love to do (international development). I happened to bring along a book of poems by Robert Frost, and these lines from the end of ¨Two Tramps In Mud Time¨ seem to describe what I´m trying to accomplish in my personal life.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future´s sakes.