The cool thing about going up to northern Peru, in the mountains, is that it’s where I was in the Peace Corps 50 years ago this year. I lived on the coast in a fishing town, Chimbote, but often took trips up to the Callejon de Huaylas, a beautiful mountain valley surrounded by peaks over 20 thousand feet high. This is a real trip down memory lane for me!
On Tuesday the first of October we flew from Portland to Lima via Atlanta. That was my first Delta flight in many years but I thought it was pretty nice. It seemed like a little more leg room and better food and service than we’ve experienced flying United/Continental to Panama. All the flights from the US arrive at about the same time and there is usually quite a jam up at the customs, but for whatever reason we caught a tail wind and arrived five minutes ahead of the crowd. We sailed through and our bags came off the luggage belts right away, so the whole process took less than a half hour. One of the Health Bridges staff came through the night before and it took two hours and he got hassled by customs carrying some of our stuff. Luckily he talked them out of paying customs import taxes.
We got picked up and taken to a Catholic formation house where guys studying to be priests live and work. No heat, no hot water and lumpy beds made us feel like we are also doing penance for something and need to work harder. It was quiet though and peaceful. Health Bridges pays to have their volunteers stay there, and has a warehouse in back to store supplies. There was supposed to be wifi but it wasn’t working so I had to borrow somebodies phone connection to send a quick message.
On Wednesday we went to two different communities around Lima to see some of their projects. One of their programs is to work with handicapped children, helping them navigate the Peruvian health system. A nurse visits each family regularly to check the health of the children and to advise the parents about things they can do for their child. The families live in very poor neighborhoods and have many challenges providing care, including clean water and sanitation. We talked with the families and I took water samples to be tested.
Lima is a huge city and really spread out. It’s geographically smaller than Mexico City, but the transportation system isn’t as good. Lima only has one elevated light rail line and a track for articulated buses, so there is tremendous car traffic. All the regular buses, colectivos, taxis are here and also thousands of three wheeled motos. As a consequence everything is chaos. I think the driving is worse and more dangerous than Mexico City for sure. Once our taxi cut a corner by driving through a gas station at 20 miles an hour, zig zaging through the pumps and scattering pedestrians on the sidewalk. Most of Thursday was spent shopping getting stuff for our presentations. We needed things like aluminum foil and white glue and stuff that you can buy in a supermarket. Harder to find are things like empty plastic buckets with lids for making school wash stations, and almost impossible are metal 5 gallon buckets. I used to find them easily but any more everything comes in plastic buckets. I did buy a few square metal cans but I think they may be a little small. We couldn’t find chimney pipe to make the inside of the stove, so I guess I’ll try to make that part out of some tin. To find all this stuff we had to go in all directions of the city, through the crazy traffic to different market areas for different things. It was a long tiring day getting all the stuff and bringing it home.
Friday though was a great day! We finally got hot water for showers and we gave our first workshop. I don’t have much control over my schedule, the workshop time and length kept changing. With the traffic we were late arriving so I felt rushed and sort of disorganized, but the participants seemed to appreciate it. The program was on how to make a families drinking water safe. The municipal water supply is contaminated so we demonstrated how to easily pasteurize it to kill harmful organisms. We demonstrated how to make a simple handwashing station without needing running water and talked about other sanitation and health issues. Normally a program like this would take several hours to go over everything, but we galloped through in about two hours and everyone was satisfied. They gave us a nice lunch as thanks and we went back to our place to prepare for the trip to Yungay.
