I hiked my ass to an internet cafe with a plan in hand. So here's what I got.
So Mike, Why Didn’t You Write for so Long:
I’d better begin by explaining why many of you may not have heard from me/us since, oh, August. No, it’s not that you were scratched from the group email list for being bad and not writing frequently; rather, I’ve been putting my personal travel updates on the website because hotmail won’t allow me to send more than a certain number of emails in a 24 hour period. That means that for every group email I write, I have to send it twice over two days – re: a pain in the ass! So here’s the deal: check out the website now and again for the updates, or if you wish, sign up for ‘auto updates’ to get an email whenever we’ve added a new story to the website.
Another excuse I came up with for not writing in a while is that Puquio’s internet connections are desperately slow, unreliable, and pricy. So there... But I’m back now! And in a big way, too. So you might want to either grab a coffee (a pot of coffee), or stretch this read over a few cold, Canadian evenings.
So Mike and Jess, What and Where the Hell is Puquio:
Puquio is a small Andean town, at over 4000 metres in altitude, in which Jess and I worked for the last month. Incredibly, Puquio has a population of 20,000 – maybe another example of an exagerated Peruvian statistic? Half of Puquianos are kids. I would maybe believe 20,000 if they started including the canine population as part of the homosapìen. Really, at one point the municipal government had a policy of killing off stray dogs: “what are you going to do with all those dogs,” said Hermano Freddy one day. I just looked away and changed the subject.
Don’t kid yourself of the importance of this town in political and administrative terms. Puquio is the capital of the largest province in the Peruvian department of Ayacucho, Lucanas. So all the big shots live there: I met the mayor on a few occassions. I regretted not asking him to get me a job in the future (they’re all corrupt) until I returned on my way to Cusco to witness a public demonstration denouncing him as lazy and useless. Ouch. Maybe I’ll hit up the former president, Alberto Fujimori, once he gets cleared of running away with millions to become president again (he's more popular than any of the other actually legal candidates)– such are Peruvian politics.
Padre Dieter:
No form of literature (is this literature?) mentioning Puquio would be complete without addressing the topic of the town’s most prized religious guy, Padre Dieter. “El Padre” is a German priest who first came to Puquio in 1969, and after a few years in other parts of Peru, has spent a good part of 30 years in Puquio. I don’t know what Puquio would be like without him. Not only is he a hilariously eccentric character – wandering the streets, towering over everyone and addressing them as “Don” or “Doña” in a very deep, German-accented voice – he has single-handedly done more for the social progression of Puquio than probably any government. A few examples, that I know of, of Padre Dieter’s fantastic projects: Huitco (an organic farm with a labratory producing everything from jam to cough syrup), Rosaspampas (a lake with boats and the only park in which children can play in Puquio; there’s a waterslide in the works), another large lake being developed and stocked with trout in order to produce a tourism industry for Puquio, and many other important things such as free health clinics for newborns, and so on. There aren’t many NGOs that can top the kind of long-term work the church has done in developing countries like Peru. You can hear Padre DIeter a mile away: "Ya," "Listo," etcetera.
So, Mike and Jess, What the Hell Did You Guys do in Puquio Anyway:
We were volunteering for a tiny Peruvian NGO called Manos Libres (Free Hands). The major project that ML is currently working on in Puquio involves the setting up of DESNAs (Defensorias Escolares de Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes) in the schools. A DESNA is where a child would go for assistance when he/she feels that their human rights have been violated in some way, a school-based liason between the victim and the authorities. It is a program chiefly promoted by UNICEF and is interesting because it involves not only local government in the defence of human rights but also school proncipals, teachers, and most importantly, the kids themselves. So a major part of what we did to that end was to go around to the schools regularly to ask, “how are the DESNAs going?”
We also helped out with workshops aimed at promoting children’s knowledge of human rights. From one of these workshops, 7 children were elected by their peers to go to Lima and represent Puquio at a national-level meeting of other children dealing with human rights under the UNICEF program, “Cultura de Paz y Noviolencia” (Culture of Peace and Non-Violence). So that was all really interesting stuff.
One day during our stint, while we were making dinner, a family from Santa Filomena, a very small town in Puquio’s jurisdiction, came to visit us. They asked for me, as the had been referred to us by Father Dieter, and started to ask me for help. They were in a state of desperation. Their twelve year-old daughter, whom they had brought along, had been raped the week before by some little asshole. The incompetent police let the kid go (!), and he escaped to Arequipa. The family had no idea what to do. (Secret: neither did I). So I just explained the typical things that Manos Libres does, primarily awareness and prevention of abuses. They told me that their community has had a recent flood of rapes, most or all going unpunished. The people are simply not aware of their rights in the first place; secondly, they don’t have anyone to help them when something happens, since the police are useless. So we’re now planning to have a few workshops in Santa Filomena: with children, parents, and general citizens, some of whom may even be the people commiting the violations. A very wierd situation, but also telling of the importance of the work of human rights NGOs in the Peruvian highlands and elsewhere.
The final project we did was actually funded by an organization from Edmonton, Change for Children. A complete coincidence. We organized a drawing contest at all the schools and received well over 1000 entries. From these, we picked 20 kids to participate in the final project of painting a mural about human rights in the Plaza de Armas, the town’s main square. I should have some pictures of the final product up on the site soon, so check it out. I have to admit, it turned out really nice. It was a really fun four days of painting with these super artistic kids, too. But the best part was as we were finishing up: a man was explaining to his son what each human right in the collage meant. What a great project! It promotes human rights awareness and is so great for the kids to participate in. Plus it doesn’t need a lot of funding. ML is painting at least two more for now, and then they’ll go to paint in the schools.
The last thing I’m going to go off about regarding our work in Puquio has to do with me giving speeches. On two ocassions I was duped into going to either a workshop or meeting, only to find that, as the panel discussion was about to begin, I was on the panel! The first one was okay as I only had to introduce myself and apologize for being useless to the discussion. The second time was much more reddening. I was part of a panel discussing the environment and played the role of the exotic Westerner (as if Westerners are any good at keeping their evironment clean!). My part had to do with getting up before the mayor and about 100 other people and giving an impromtu 10 minute-long speech. I, nervously using the informal Spanish command form, basically demanded that the mayor get some more garbage cans around town, pressure multinationals to start up a bottle recycling program, and to take advantage of a Swiss NGO project in the area promoting solar power infrastructure development. I think it came across as: hey, Canada sucks at environmentalism, but Peru sucks more, so do something about it, Peruvians!
Terrorism, Disappeared Children, and Organ-Trafficking in Puquio in the 80s and 90s:
To make this post a little shorter (Ha! What a joke, hey!), I’m going to save this topic for a post of its own. For now, just take this as a promise, a raincheck, that I’ll do something up really good about this topic.
A Temporary Split:
Jess, having suffered for too long with urges to head back to Huancayo to take weaving classes, has done just that. She left on her own last Thursday night, and I see she’s just done a post of her own, describing the biz on her end. I, in the meantime, wrapped up working with Manos Libres (I went to the Canadian embassy with 7 Puquio kids, some of whom had never been in a highrise before, nevermind heard the Francophone spin on the Spanish “rrrrr” from the ambassador’s assistant), and now I’m in Cusco!
I just got here this morning after a very eventful, but typically Peruvian, 14 hour hell-bus ride. So far I’ve seen lots of familiar places, as well as familiar faces, from the last time I was here two years ago. Cusco has only changed a little since then (though the same could be said for the town over the last 500 years). I’m now in the process of apartment hunting, beginning Spanish classes, and hoping to get a job in either Cusco’s sheesha bar or maybe one of the Irish Pubs serving Guinness.
When Jess and I reunite in a couple of weeks, we’re planning on giving the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu a miss and heading on a 4/5 day trek to a recently re-“discovered” site near Abancay called Choquequirao. It was re-“found” in 2002, untouched by graverobbers, and even exhibiting human remains, gold, and a mysterious pyramid. Cool, hey? Don’t worry, we’ll still do Machu Picchu – just by train. They’ve “limited” the number of visitors to 500 per day, and there’s a 30 day waiting list, not to mention the US$250 price tag/rip-off; something tells me it’s lost its charm now.
The best thing about Cusco this time is definitly my ability to scare off shoeshiners (and women wielding llamas asking for you to take their photos for money) with “no thank you” in Quechua. Okay, I'm off to Los Perros for a hot wine and some wicked tatters I've been craving for 2 years...
Until next time (probably soon ... probably) ...
Mike
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