Similar to eleven years ago, I’m taking a sabbatical from
work for 3 months (+ some vacation time) to travel – this time in South
America. Nineteen weeks in total, spanning from mid-October 2013 to
late-February 2014. At this point, the only things that are set is my flight to
Lima and from Buenos Aires, and the itinerary for Weeks 1 and 2.
A question one might have is “why?” regarding this
sabbatical. The more apt question is actually “why not?” A ton of friends and
co-workers have told me that they are envious and wish they could take such a
trip… in the end, I suppose it comes down to the “barriers of entry” for
ditching everything for a period of time. Though it initially felt quite
daunting, in reality my barriers to entry were quite small – my house and my
two dear dogs; all I needed was enough savings and someone to watch over my
house & dogs (thank you Mary). Since I’m traveling in South America and my
style of travel is far from high-end, the savings required is not so
substantial. At least I think it’s not so substantial – I guess we’ll see if
I’m hitting you all up for spare change by the end of this thing.
At this point, all I know is that there are lots of
countries I’d like to explore further: from Colombia to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia,
Chile, Argentina, and the “Guays” (Uru and Para). And if I’m lucky, I’ll manage
to make my way down to Antarctica as well.
But for now, let’s get on to Week 1: October 12th
through October 18th.
Prior to arranging my leave of absence at work, I already
had a trip planned to Peru with Give Back Cincinnati, a local volunteer
organization in Cincinnati that coordinates a variety of volunteer events for
anyone who wants to join. They also plan a few trips away from Cincinnati each
year – in New Orleans and abroad – in coordination with either Habitat for
Humanity or Fuller Center for Housing. So this particular week, I was already
planning to join 18 other volunteers from GBC for a week in a small village
called La Florida in Canete, Peru. The build here is with Fuller and the group
leader, Zenon Colque, has plans to build over 500 homes for the locals. What’s
different about these home building efforts abroad is that the goal is often to
build an entire community, versus a one-off home. You can read more about it
here: http://www.fullercenter.org/peru.
Saturday, October 12th, 2013
I spent an extra long time this morning bidding adieu to my
dear dogs, Arthur and River. I didn’t get the sense that Arthur had any idea
what was in store for the coming months, since he’s just a big ol’ happy
goofball. But River had already started to get moodier than normal this past
week. She definitely knows what’s coming up… many people say that border
collies are very intelligent and perceptive, and I think that’s definitely true
of my super-moody little girl. Fortunately, Mary had already been living at the
house for over a month, which will help ease the transition for her.
My friend Dale picked me and another fellow traveler Robert
Alonso up from our abodes in Hyde Park and dropped us at the airport a few
hours before take-off. Robert and I knew each other from a previous
home-building trip in April to Haiti, which was initially coordinated by GBC
until the trip fell through due to lack of interest, so Robert and I joined
another group as free agents since each of us had already secured vacation time
and still wanted to go.
At the airport in Cincinnati, we met up with another fellow
volunteer Tracy, and then with 4-5 more in Atlanta where our international
flight to Lima was scheduled to depart from. We arrived in Lima at about 10pm,
but then spent the next 3 hours waiting in a wide variety of immigration &
customs lines.
Once we finally made it out of the customs/immigration mess,
we were greeted at the exit by Zenon, our host for the week, and Monica, his
assistant. Because we were so late, it took 20-30 minutes for Zenon to get a
minivan coordinated to take us to our hotel that evening. When the minivan
arrived, it was the proverbial 10 lbs in a 5 lb sack issue that is all too
common in developing countries, but can freak us Americans out until we get
used to it. We got a quick refresher on the need to bend our concept of
“personal space” and how it’s best to NOT pay attention to what the driver is
doing in order to maintain our sanity.
When we arrived to the hotel at 2am, we found that we would
be staying across the street from an entire row of late-night seedy dance clubs.
A large group of our volunteer team had arrived in Peru several days in advance
to tour Machu Picchu and some of the other ruins, and most of these folks had
already been at a club called Tequila Rock for 5 hours when we strolled in and
brought a second wind along with us. We probably stayed another 3 hours – for
many, this was a chance to get see old friends they had gone on previous GBC
trips with, and for others like me, it was a chance to meet the friendly people
I’d be spending much of the next 144 hours with. At the very end, a dancing
robot on stilts with neon lights came out and I think several of us figured
that might be our cue to go get some sleep.
Sunday, October 13th, 2013
We lumbered out of bed this morning after a late night out –
initially, the plan was to have breakfast at the hotel and then get on the road
to Canete where we’d be staying the rest of the week. Once our crew found out
that the hotel breakfast was, in fact, continental in all senses of the word,
Zenon and our group leaders (Vince and AG) called an audible and we walked
several blocks away to a traditional Peruvian restaurant for an excellent
belly-filling buffet of some stuff that I wanted to eat (like chicken and beef
and quinoa and rice) and some stuff that I didn’t want to eat (like chicken
feet, mushrooms, and tripe = and yes, I equate the nastiness of mushrooms with
tripe).
Interestingly enough, there were lots of Western chains that
we walked by on the way to the restaurant – McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut,
KFC… but no Taco Bell. I wonder if Peruvians would take offense to a Taco Bell
or something? No Chipotle in sight either.
Since 19 of us can’t fit in Zenon’s car, three of us joined
him and the rest went on a public bus for the 2 hour ride down to Canete. We
quickly learned on this bus ride that Peruvians have an exceedingly strange taste
in bus movies. We saw some crazy bloody violent movie called “Drive” starring
Ryan Gosling – this must have been before he became big (i.e. he was truly a
“gosling”). I don’t think any of us suspected anything afoul until a female
character got a shotgun blast to the head in close range and the camera didn’t
pan away. Guts everywhere. A couple scenes later? Nudity. While the guys on the
bus no doubt appreciated this, most were a bit surprised that this was shown on
a public bus. I think the collective
thought by many in our group was “Oh my gosh, what about the children!” But I found myself wondering
about the societal differences – clearly Peru isn’t sanitizing life for their
kids and are not worried about many of the things we build up massive walls/laws
to protect our kids from. In other words, maybe naked boobies are only such a
big deal in the US because we learn early on that we’re not supposed to see
naked boobies. If anyone is thinking of testing out this particular theory, I
know a number of willing male participants (though they may all be too old).
When we arrived at the bus station, Zenon greeted us and
secured a massive Truckmobile 3000 to take us & our luggage to the village
of Nuevo Imperial, where we would be staying at a hotel for the week. I’m not
sure if it was really a hotel, since it seemed that we were the only people
there, in addition to a few renters downstairs. We split up into logical
groupings for bunking – Robert and I shared an abnormally small triple with
Andrew, who used to live in Cincinnati but is now in Columbus. I was lucky
enough to win our paper/rock/scissors game and got to sleep in the full-sized
bed, while Andrew and Robert had to deal with the bunks.
After briefly settling in, we loaded into a minibus to go to
La Florida, the neighboring village we would be working at. Along the way, the
minibus stopped. Apparently, they had forgotten to put gas in the thing – minor
oversight. Almost an hour later, we all loaded up in a minivan and went to a
school in La Florida where the students were putting on traditional dance
performance. I’ve been to traditional dance performances in many countries
before, but generally the audience is full of tourists which leaves me
wondering how truly authentic it really is. In this case, we were the only
non-locals there and most had no idea we were coming.
After a brief introduction in the Fuller Centre office in La Florida, we got back on the bus (or van? I can’t remember now) and went into the main downtown area of Canete for a nice chicken dinner. I don’t know what they feed their chickens in Peru, but wow – these broiled chickens were incredibly succulent and amazing. And the volume of food they dropped on the table was astounding as well. Fortunately, we had some meat eaters (not all were large men, either) who brought along some extra stomachs in their luggage for just such an occasion. The group of us also put down a fair amount of beer as well.
When we returned to the hotel, our fearless leaders Vince and AG went out for a beer run and we gathered in one of the normal-sized triples to imbibe & socialize.
Monday, October 14th, 2013
Today was our first workday! After breakfast, we piled into
a bus for the 15 minute drive to La Florida. Apparently, a portion of the main
road doubles as the primary marketplace, with barely enough space for traffic
to pass through without hitting the vendor stalls. Each morning, we would drive
past fresh fish being gutted and what initially appeared to some as rubber
chicken vendors (hint: they weren’t rubber).
At the Fuller Centre office, we split up into two teams
because we were such a large group. The A team headed up to a set of three
homes where they would assist the homeowners with framing & laying the roof
during the week. The B team, who quickly changed their name to Team Condor
(ca-caw!), stayed at the office and worked on rebar. Andrew and I had not
joined a team, instead opting to ride with Zenon and little Grace to the
hardware store to fetch some supplies.
Who is little Grace? She’s a little 5 year old with a smile
and laugh that melts – when her mother more or less abandoned her, Zenon and
the community in La Florida took over to raise her. Through the week, every
last person in our group would succumb to the sheer cuteness powers of this
little girl. I was first. Grace and I shared the backseat of Zenon’s car and
played a game that transcends language – I just kept tickling her, and then
allowed her to tickle me too from time to time for good measure. I would be
lying if I said I didn’t have more than one thought about whether I
could/wanted to adopt her. I’m guessing a few others had the same reaction.
The hardware store was amazing and familiar at the same time
– it looked just like a Home Depot we might see back home – shopping carts,
price tags, bar codes, end displays…
there was an item that we couldn’t find there, so we went to a small
mom-and-pop shop to get it. This was neat to me because we saw two very
different ends of commerce in one short trip. In many developing nations (note
that this is my theory based on what I’ve seen), there are commerce centers
where lots of small shops congregate together and sell their wares: a hardware
district, a clothing district, a grocery district… you get the idea. These
shops started selling unbranded goods supplied by local mom-and-pop
manufacturers, and have increasingly been moving to branded goods from larger
centralized manufacturers (less so for perishable grocery). In the States, the
closest parallel is probably a farmer’s market. Historically, these mom-and-pop
shops would be put out of business by a larger store, like your neighborhood
hardware store, before the Home Depots’ & Lowes’ came and put those
neighborhood stores out of business. So basically, this town of Canete (and
many others like it) are leap-frogging to current Western methods vs toiling
through the “natural” progression of things. The telephone industry shows this
even clearer – very few towns in developing nations have the infrastructure in
place to support wired telephones, so when cell phone technology came out, it
boomed and took off since the infrastructure was much simpler. Someone a long
time ago commented to me that when she was in India, she saw a guy riding an
ox-cart while talking on his cell phone.
When we got back to the office, Team Condor was working on
rebar and absolutely loved that we brought fresh hacksaw blades for them.
Apparently cutting rebar with the equivalent of a butter knife gets a bit
tiring. All of the work stations appeared to be busy, so Andrew stayed behind
while I wandered up to the house where the A Team was working. There were a few
people standing around trying to find something to do there as well, so I just
hopped up on the scaffolding and hoped for the best. Before too long, I got a
task to trim the excess rebar from the vertical columns – I got me a hacksaw
and began hacking. Or sawing. Cassie joined me after a bit – she was more
adventurous than I and was sitting somewhat awkwardly on the tops of the walls
versus the comfort of the rickety scaffolding. As I was sawing off and bending
the last piece of rebar to set the remnant free, my forearm caught another
piece of cut rebar and provided a quick look into the white goodness inside of
muscle fibers and other epidermi. That it wasn’t bleeding profusely showed how
deep it was. I hopped down and Emily patched me up like a pro, while yelling
out that we were now zero seconds since our last recordable injury.
One-handed people are not so useful on an actual work site,
so I headed back to the office in defeat. Kelly showed me how to bend rebar
squares, so I thankfully had something to do. Doug, Beth, Kelly and I did
this for the rest of the afternoon, constantly in search of the perfect square.
It seemed that any time any of us beamed with pride from making a perfect one,
the next five were doomed to be crappy.
My bandages didn’t hold up so well, so I did what any
red-blooded Kentuckian would do. I duct-taped the bandage to my forearm. The
redneck’s guide to fixing things: if it moves and shouldn’t, use duct tape; if
it doesn’t move and should, use WD-40.
That night, we gathered again in one of the rooms to drink
some beer and socialize. Emily and I had decided at some early point in the
evening to be drinking buddies, so we shared the large 1L beer bottles. My
thought was that this would keep me from consuming two full bottles as I had
the night before. Instead, it had the opposite effect – I think we went through
seven 1L bottles between the two of us. I blame her – she’s clearly a bad
influence. J
Tuesday, October 15th, 2013
I woke up this morning with a small hangover, though I’m not
sure exactly why. What I do know is that one of the local beers Cusquena comes
in 4 different types, and I had been successful in trying all four.
After our breakfast of bread, eggs, and oatmeal at Zenon’s
garage, we got back to La Florida and started working again, trying to see if a
good night’s sleep aided or hindered in our rebar making skillz. Before too
long, Ricardo (the 19-yr-old lead contractor for our group) told us it was time
to take the completed rebar forms that the group in total had been making up to
the ½ completed house these belonged too. It turns out that our house was much
farther away than the A Team’s house, so we definitely got a little extra
exercise. The house we were working on had a foundation and brick walls up – we
had made the rebar forms that would sit atop the brick walls and then we would
pour concrete to finish the top of the walls. The work after this is putting up
the roofing frame and laying the fiberglass roof sheeting, which is what A Team
was doing on their homes.
I don’t know that we ever got fully situated to where
everyone was doing something productive, since Ricardo didn’t speak a lick of
English and he clearly had never led a group of people on a worksite before.
Fortunately, we had Mariela on our team – she grew up in Puerto Rico and served
to translate for us. She spent most of the afternoon as the site foreman of
sorts – translating for Ricardo and Richard (the other local guy; I think he
was one of the homeowner’s) and ensuring that everyone had something to do. I’m
guessing that she may have felt like she was doing more talking than doing,
which can be frustrating since she flew all the way to Peru to get down and
dirty. In reality, she was a tremendously huge help, more than she probably
realizes.
At some point in the afternoon, the homeowner of the house
we were working on (I forgot his name) showed us his current home. The home was
a small 10x10 room of thatched walls and tarps – looking at the current living
quarters makes it abundantly obvious why getting one of these homes (with sweat
equity) is truly transformational… more so than in the US, I think. In the US,
the new homeowners for Habitat or Fuller homes currently live in something that
is inhabitable by our Western standards – the benefit is often with being able
to “own” the house and call it yours along with the pride and upkeep that comes
along with it. In developing nations, there’s a whole added level because the new
homeowners are generally living in what we would call squalor. A full home for
them, even though tiny by our standards, is such a massive upgrade that it has
ramifications beyond just shelter, but also in hope, pride, and attitude. We
saw this time and time again as previous home recipients wanted to show us
where their homes and they beamed with pride. The outside showed it as well –
the homes were generally immaculately clean and you often could find flowers
and other plants out front, even though this part of the country was more or
less a desert.
Oh yeah, the new homeowner also had a fairly sizable guinea
pig farm on his property. In Peru, guinea pigs are not pets – they are a
delicacy, generally fetching higher prices than alpaca or beef tenderloin. A
few others had tried guinea pig meat (called cuy in Peru) while in Cusco before this build and only had positive
things to say. I don’t know that I’m going to try it though… I generally have a
repulsion to eating meat that shows up on your plate looking like the animal it
came from. That’s one of the major reasons I don’t like crab or lobster. I also think that’s completely hypocritical of me because I truly believe it would be better
for us all to know exactly what we were eating as I think it would give a stronger
sense of respect for the animal who died to be on our plates. But I guess this is one
of my exceedingly few known weaknesses.
As we walked back to the office to wait for the bus to take
us back to the hotel, a massive long parade of kids starting walking by in
costume – it seems that La Florida must celebrate Halloween a good 2 ½ weeks
early or something. Given that this was a poor community, very few kids could
afford to buy a costume. Instead, they had to be creative… and creative were
they ever. Using cardboard boxes, empty bottles, scrap pieces of plastic, and
who knows what else, these kids were able to create the most interesting
costumes… many of which seemed nicer than what we would have bought back home.
When we got back to the hotel, we engaged in another round
of hot water roulette. We found out yesterday that if more than 5 people are
trying to use hot water at a time, the electrical system can’t handle it and
the breaker is tripped. Trying to convince 19 people to wait their turn is no
easy logistical solution either, so many often ended up with a nice brisk ball-shrinking
cold shower.
After dinner that evening, one of our groupmates had
arranged with the hotel attendant to set up a card table in one of the common
areas. A few rounds of Uno and Speed Uno later, I was pooped and headed off to
bed. Many of us had started to come down with sneezes and coughs and I was no
exception. I figured I should play it safer than the night before and try to
get a good night’s rest. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen – I came down with a
fever that night and tried to sweat it out, and the rest of the building wasn’t
exactly conducive to sleep for anyone either. From the crazy loud birthday
party downstairs to the smoking fumes that crept into some rooms to the
obnoxiously loud alarm clock that seemed to go off every 5 minutes from 3:30am
to 7:00am… lots of people didn’t get the rest they wanted.
Wednesday, October 16th, 2013
We had a day off scheduled today to see some local Peruvian
sites, including what Zenon calls the “mini-Galapagos” of Peru. I was kinda
iffy on the idea of taking a day off to go sight-seeing since we’re only here
for five days and I think a few others may have felt the same way, but I
figured Zenon knows what he’s doing.
By this point in the week, enough people had spent 1:1 time
with Zenon that we started calling him “the most interesting man in the world”
– truly his vision and dedication to what he’s trying to do in La Florida is
nothing short of inspiring. We took it the next level, of course, by imparting
completely nonsensical facts to add to Zenon’s legend as well – such as, the
only reason there is water in La Florida is that Zenon willed it to be, and the
ancient Inca Road was built by hand by Zenon before he turned 15, and… well,
you get the drift. None of this was done in mockery – it was quite the
opposite. No one left the week with anything less than the utmost respect for
this amazing man.
After breakfast, we loaded up on the bus for the 2 hour drive down to the coastal town of Paracas. When we arrived, we played a 45-minute game of “hurry up and wait”, shuffling from one place to another. It seems that most of the speedboats to the Balletes Islands (mini Galapagos) had already left full of other tourists. I thought this was fantastic since we would be fighting with 30 other boats to see the sights.
After breakfast, we loaded up on the bus for the 2 hour drive down to the coastal town of Paracas. When we arrived, we played a 45-minute game of “hurry up and wait”, shuffling from one place to another. It seems that most of the speedboats to the Balletes Islands (mini Galapagos) had already left full of other tourists. I thought this was fantastic since we would be fighting with 30 other boats to see the sights.
The basic gist of the 2 hour tour was as follows: get on an unnecessarily powerful speedboat with more people than any self-respecting US Fire Marshall would deem acceptable, bounce our way over the waves to the mini-Nazca Lines site, and then bounce our way to the mini-Galapagos and cruise around a bit before returning back to land, safe and sound.
To begin the trip, the lead guide went on a 5-minute schpiel in Spanish explaining where we were going and what we would see. At the end, he asked “comprende?” I think we startled him with our collective rapid response “NO!”… after which he smiled and repeated himself in English. Then the boat started and the driver got to have fun with the excessively powerful boat and high waves in his very successful attempts to soak the poor folks who sat in the back of the boat.
The mini-Nazca Line was a singular massive structure that the ancient peoples dug into the side of the mountain – this one was called the “candelabra”, interestingly enough because it looked like a candelabra. The main shaft of the candelabra apparently points in perfect North-South direction. I think the tour people purposefully left out the first few attempts on the other side of the mountain where the ancients messed up the alignment and didn’t have a large enough jar of Wite-Out.
The main attraction of the Balletes Islands was next, where we saw lots of sea lions somehow perched on tall craggy rocks to bask in the sun – I can’t imagine that those would be comfortable in the least, but I suppose if my body were 55% body fat evenly distributed from head to toe, any position on anything would probably be comfortable to me as well.
We also saw lots of boobies. Not the type that we got to see on the public bus, but the bird type. And then a ton of seagulls. I suppose it wouldn’t be all that incorrect to say it was a shit ton of seagulls – after all, there are so many seagulls that there’s an entire seagull shit gathering operation all around these islands. Apparently, that shit is good fertilizer. This whole operation caused me to wonder aloud, what would the birdshit collectors call their profession on a resume? I’m guessing “Avian Fecal Fertilizer Engineer”. Let me know if you have a better title.
After returning to dry land and a quick lunch including our
bus driver taking us the wrong way on a one-way street in the nearby town of
Pisco, we headed back north to the coastal town of Cerro Azul to hang on the
beach and watch the sunset.
At the beach, a handful of brave souls got in the very cold
waters, a few others played sports and lost Vince’s son’s Aerobie in the ocean
water (sorry about that!), and others wandered in search of some trinket
shopping. An hour or so later, we were all at the end of a long pier watching
the sun set in perfect picturesque fashion. There were also surfers catching
some late evening waves and a few dolphins playing with them to boot.
We showered up back at the hotel and were offered some
options for dinner: go back to the chicken place, get Chinese food, or get
Kenyan pizza (to be fair, Zenon said “Canete” pizza, but I heard “Kenya” and
thought it was funnier). We voted and went back to the chicken place – but
fortunately, this time they ordered a variety of foods for us to fill up on.
After stuffing our faces, we walked across the town square
to huddle in an unnecessarily cramped corner of the Pisco Zapata bar to partake
in what Zenon claims to be “the best Pisco Sour in Peru”. I wasn’t so sure of
that claim, so I had three just to make sure. I don’t always drink pisco sours, but when I do, I crowd into the tiny Pisco
Zapata bar and order a few.
We were having a great time, but we knew it was time to come
to an end when a wild-eyed man with an almost-scary level of control over his
facial expressions came into the bar with a wooden box that he sat on. It turns
out that this wooden box is a musical instrument called a “cahon”. He kinda stunned us all by screaming out a few tunes without warning while hammering away on the cahon. Finally,
he stopped and me and a few others made sure to tip him hoping that he would go
away. That’s not what happened though.
Next, he made me sit on the cahon and attempt to play it. A
few others said I was doing quite well actually, and come to think of it, I
guess I did enjoy playing with a large piece of wood between my legs. And I would have been quite happy to continue playing with my cahon-es, but I’m guessing he made me
get off of it because I was showing him up. Mad skillz.
Thursday, October 17th, 2013
This morning, we got to the house and found that in our day
off, Ricardo and Richard had gotten a lot of the concrete prep work done. Late
on Tuesday, we had begun fashioning wooden panels above the walls on either
side of the rebar into which concrete could be poured. We struggled to get even
one wall complete. We returned to find that many (but not all) of the wood
panels had been assembled using a far simpler technique.
Ricardo had taken somewhat of a liking towards me and
decided that he could communicate effectively with me, despite the fact that he
spoke much too quickly for my rudimentary Spanish and that he didn’t understand
the concept of using simple phrases. Every other word out of his mouth was “Prag”
– it had gotten annoying quickly. He blurted out a quick set of instructions to
me and left with half of our team to the office to finish up some rebar for the
interior walls.
So Andrew, Keith, Doug and I had all morning with peace and
quiet – and we felt like we were cranking too. I think this was the first time
all week that any of us had felt truly productive. By lunchtime, we were more
or less at a stopping point as we were either waiting for the interior wall
rebar or we needed clearer instruction on how to proceed.
After lunch, Ricardo joined us and got little frantic. Their
hope was to pour the concrete this afternoon but there were too many loose
ends. For example, Ricardo seemed to have forgotten that the electrical pipes
needed to be assembled and inserted and he seemed to not realize the
criticality of the interior wall rebar. He drove me a bit insane the next 4
hours between barking out my name, giving us unintelligible instructions,
giving us completely irrelevant instructions, and interrupting the busiest
person to do something rather trivial. By 4pm, the work wasn’t complete and we
had to go. Zenon had scheduled another field trip for the group and the whole group
was waiting for us back at the office. I know the other three would have been
more than happy to forego the field trip and finish up the work, but that didn’t
seem an option.
The bus took us to the town of Lunahuana, a picturesque
little town where apparently adventure sports are very common. There were a
number of outfits offering 4x4s, rafting, and other activities that I would
generally be all over… but our purpose there was to sample another pisco sour.
I’m not exactly positive why, but it was good nonetheless. Next, we got back
into the bus and stopped by the Pisco Zapata factory where we were given little
to no explanation of the production process. Instead, I fathomed how the
process worked based on the location of tanks, coils, heating elements, and
cooling pools. Then Zenon passed around shots for sampling a few of the different
types of pisco – many of us left with sampler packs. (Judy – thanks for
carrying mine back to the States for me!)
After shower roulette, we went back to the garage for Zenon’s
special 3-way chili recipe. For those of you who haven’t been to Cincinnati,
chili is kind of a thing in Cincinnati, and we generally order a 3-way, 4-way,
or 5-way from Skyline, Goldstar, or my personal favorite Camp Washington Chili.
What I forgot to share earlier is that Zenon lives in Cincinnati as well and
considers it to be his second home (or maybe his first). His chili truly put
any of the restaurants to absolute shame. He loaded up everyone’s plates with a
seemingly impossible mound of spaghetti and chili, yet most managed to finish
every last noodle. Just spectacular. I
don’t always eat chili, but when I do, I’m making my own damn chili.
Friday, October 18th, 2013
We got to the house this morning and had a little bit of
touch-up work to complete before we could get started on pouring concrete.
Fortunately, they had a concrete mixer on site. Apparently in many other builds
that our group has been on, concrete mixing was done by hand with shovels.
Here, the formula was rather simple – fire up the mixer, toss in two full
buckets of water, a bag of concrete mix, and then shovel gravel/dirt into the
mixer until Richard told us the consistency was right. Then we formed a bucket
brigade to get buckets of concrete up to Ricardo on the scaffolding, and he
poured the concrete into the wooden forms.
During this process, the homeowner’s wife also went up on
the scaffolding – turns out that she was doing two things: 1) putting a small
bottle of pisco in each corner of the house for good luck, and 2) sprinkling
quinoa in the concrete around the periphery so that the family may never go
hungry.By lunchtime, we were done and there wasn’t much else we could do since the concrete would need to set. The A team had also hit a stopping point, having finished roofs on two of the houses and a frame up on the third. In the late afternoon, we had a closing ceremony, where each of us was presented with a thank-you certificate from one of the neighborhood kids. And Doug summed up our sentiments perfectly (with help from Mariela for translation) back to the community expressing our thanks for opening their homes and hearts to us.
That evening, we got cleaned up and drove in the bus back to Lima where Zenon took us to a dance hall. They had a live band on hand and professional dancers who performed a variety of traditional dances in full costume. My personal favorite was one where they had a bull & bullfighter, and the bullfighter got too arrogant and the bull took him out. From time to time, they opened up the floor to the audience and we’d invariably hop out there and attempt to dance without looking too silly. But none of us cared – we were just happy to be enjoying one last evening as a group.
If it weren’t obvious already, I really really really enjoyed this week. From the very beginning, you could tell that all of us were kindred spirits of sorts. I remember a few people were talking about how they had to explain to friends or family why they would choose to spend their vacation going to a poor neighborhood of a developing country to build houses. In fact, many of you reading this may have the same question floating in your head. To a T, the thought process for every one of us was “why wouldn’t you?” To me, there’s almost nothing more obvious. I’m just disappointed that I didn’t learn about Give Back Cincinnati’s Give Back Beyond program 5-6 years ago. I would have almost certainly joined them on trips to Guatemala, Romania, Ghana, among other places.
I left impressed with our team: Roberto and Mariela took on the burden of translating for 17 others; Vince & AG coordinated the week in a cool, calm, and collected fashion; Andrew for our 45 minute debate on pure vs managed capitalism and still left as friends (man up Andrew, you know I won…); Emily for taking a stronger interest in a snot-nosed brat of a kid to find out the boy’s father is in jail for 30 years; Kelly for somehow packing two weeks of clothes into two small backpacks and for lending me her sunglasses to make sure I didn’t get concrete in my eyes; first time international traveler Samie for so quickly drawing the conclusion (which takes many others years & multiple trips to figure out) that no matter which country you’re from, we’re all the same; Judy for giving me hope by staying awesome and active though a decade+ my senior; Cassie & Danielle for climbing atop any wall with zero fear; Nazly for her passion on social justice causes; Beth for our awesome conversations and for enjoying my random ipod music collection almost as much as me; Keith for somehow managing to fit his tall frame on vehicles clearly not meant for his height; newbies Venita & Miranda for taking a complete leap of faith with this trip; Tracy for managing to stick with the trip despite a minor crisis at work; and Doug for his incredible heartfelt speech & the rebar Fuller plaque he toiled over himself and presented on behalf of the team to Zenon.
So, to the lot of you – thanks a ton for making this week so memorable, and I hope to see you all again when I get home… either for a reunion at my place or during the next GBB trip.
Random Tidbits
1.
Pitchers of beer are not so big. Bottles of beer
are quite big (probably the same size as the smallish pitchers). I tended to
drink straight out of both, versus pouring into a smaller glass. This wasn’t
always smart, given my excessively rapid liquid consumption rate.
2.
The word for mushrooms in Spanish is
champinones. This was quite possibly the most important word I’ve learned so
far. (I already knew “bano”.)
3.
Greatest line uttered this week: “Como se dice Bitch, I’ll fucking kill you!”
4.
There are a lot of stray dogs in Peru. In La
Florida at least, Zenon told us that every dog does have an “owner” who feeds
them and makes sure they are ok. The dogs were extremely friendly, and
surprisingly of a very wide variety: big dogs, little dogs, long hair, short
hair, you name it. I guess I’m used to seeing stray dogs in developing
countries eventually meld into a singular “mixed mutt” breed.
5.
I saw lots of signs on restaurants in Lima and
in Canete that said “Chifa”. It took a little bit but I finally figured out
that this meant “Chinese food”. There’s actually a fairly large Asian
population in Peru (my Peruvian-Chinese friend Jorge Tan can attest to that).
Some of you may recall that one of the recent presidents of Peru was of Japanese
descent, Alberto Fujimori. Of course, you may also recall that he was quite
corrupt.
6.
I have yet to see a full squatter. Most of the
nicer restaurants and our own hotel has full sit-down toilets. Other places
have an actual porcelain toilet but without
a toilet seat, which forces an awkward brace-your-arm-against-a-clean-wall half
squat position. I suppose there was a toilet seat shortage, or maybe toilet
seats are controlled by the mafia who charges such exorbitant prices that only
hotels & nice restaurants can afford them. I’ll try to get to the bottom of
this for you.
And finally, it’s story time. This one is called “Vince
Eats a Bar of Soap” (as told to me from Andrew)
Andrew and Emily went on a snacks run for one evening’s
festivities and bought all sorts of goodies. One of the items that Andrew
picked up was a larger rectangle with a lemon graphic on it – he stared at it
and it took a while before he realized it was in fact, a bar of soap, despite
the letters on the packaging explicitly saying “soap” in English no less. Andrew wondered aloud to Emily whether or not
someone would fall for it – Emily quickly shared that she would never be so mean
as to try, but Andrew has some evil in him. So they bought the bar of soap
mixed in with the other snacks.
When Emily and Andrew got back to the hotel, a group had gathered
in one of the rooms to drink some beers, snack on food, and socialize. The
contents of the bag were scattered on the floor and people munched on chips and
cookies and the like. Someone grabbed the bar of soap, and astutely noted “what
the hell is a bar of soap doing in here?”, temporarily sending Andrew into a
crest-fallen state as he explained his trick to those present. The bar was
returned to the “pot” and socializing continued.
Some minutes later, Vince grabbed the bar of soap and peeled
it open. He either had not been in the room when the joke was revealed or he
was not paying attention or he was in the restroom – this is unclear to me. But
Vince opened it just like you would an ice cream sandwich, and proceeded to
almost take a bit for what seemed an eternity, as he continued in conversation.
Everyone else was busy looking away trying not to give the gig up… except dear
sweet Judy, who yells out “Vince, that’s a bar of soap!” The room gave their
best death glare to Judy, but fortunately, Vince hadn’t heard her as he
proceeded to take a big bite from the bar… followed by a quizzical look… and
then some minor gagging.
The room erupted, including Vince, who could not have been a
better sport.
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