What to do next...

It's starting to hit home that I'm finishing Peace Corps in 6 months and I need to decide what to do next. There's sort of a panorama of future options, but they generally all involve getting a job, having a family and being a responsible adult at some point in the foreseeable future. (So stop worrying mom.) The questions that remain are where to live and what job to do there - so not small questions. Lately, I waffle between Austin, Texas, the DC area, and the Peruvian Amazon, my new favorite place on earth. For jobs, one of the ideas that I'm toying with is opening an alternative therapy and healing center, of course this is after I go to school to get another master's in some kind of counseling profession. I feel like the fates might be aligning in that direction. (This plan of changes weekly of course, but for now this is interesting.) Then, today on CNN's list of the best places to open a business Georgetown, Texas, a small town just north of Austin where I went to college, is number 2 and Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of DC is number 5. I have sort of always known in the back of my head that I want to own my own business, or at least somehow be my own boss. It gave my dad such great opportunities to spend time with us and be able to support us well, which is part of what I aspire to.

Okay, so that is post is not just me waxing poetic about my future and boring to death everyone who doesn't live inside my head. Wanna see some composting toilets? These were from the program that CARE was executing down south in the earthquake zone. I was down there helping them with some hygiene education and training folks on how to care for their latrines. It was interesting and I really think that CARE is a great organization. Despite the usual management and logistical problems that come from trying to pull of projects in distressed areas for a reasonable cost they can really can get some stuff done.

These are the before toilets - located over the irrigation canal:


This is the inside of the composting latrine. These cement toilet and urinal things are designed to sepearate the... liquid from the solid. Wet poop doesn't compost.


Proud proprietor of a composting toilet:


They may not have bathrooms but the sand boarding is AWESOME in Huancachina:


My entire explanation of why I want to live in the Peruvian jungle: (This is no where near Ica or the earthquake zone, but it's where I went following working with CARE)

Tarapoto to Yurimaguas to Lagunas to Pacaya Samiria to Iquitos

Iquiteña, indigenous jungle cerveza, delicious... or at least the best beer in Peru


Howler Monkeys at Pilpintuwasi (The Butterfly House) in Iquitos


The view from the 3rd deck of Eduardo IV, our boat from Yurimaguas to Lagunas down Rio Huayalla


The Watermelon Slayer at Laguna Azul, near Tarapoto


Aaron and I mototaxi it around Iquitos

Back from the Jungle

I have learned that when I travel I must bring the cord to my camera to upload the blow by blow photos. The Pacaya Samiria Reserve was AMAZING. It's a protected area in the jungle, home to crocodiles, monkeys, jaguars, sloths, incredibly cool frogs, medicinal plants, piranhas, tarantulas, tapirs, and other animals that I had never heard of before. We canoed around the park for 3 days and camped out in a house on stilts in the river. I highly recommend the whole experience, it might be my favorite place in Peru. Then on the plane trip back to Lima we flew over Huascaran, the highest peak in Peru and the Paramount Pictures mountain. It was breathtaking. I happened to glance out the window and literally gasped. Photos soon. Back to work for now. Cariño.

Jungle Boogie

Yurimaguas to the head of the Amazon in Iquitos in 3 days. Pink dolphins, monkeys and sloths, oh my.

Also, I learned about Takiwasi, a very cool center in Tarapoto that couples traditional Peruvian medicine, specifically ayahuasca with modern western medicine and psychology to treat addictions and other illnesses or conditions. Ayahuasca is a mixture of plants found in the Peruvian jungle used by indigenous people to induce a trance state that is part of a healing process. (There are also a lot of curious foreigners interested in trying ayahuasca that visit Peru.)

Paracas

I've been working in southern Peru where the earthquake was and there's a nearby National Reserve called Paracas. Paracas is what I imagine the surface of Mars to look like, but on the coast of the Pacific Ocean and with a huge image of a candelabra formed into the side of a hill overlooking the sea. Archaeologists think that it’s the work of the Paracas People who lived in southern Peru before the Inca, and that it’s a compass pointing north and south for ritual purposes. But, no one really knows. The Islas Ballestas are home to sea lions and PENGUINS! Hot weather penguins! It's an endangered species called the Humboldt Penguin, very cute, an excellent endangered species poster child if you ask me. We saw a baby sea lion learning to swim. It was paddling along behind its mom and would crawl up on her back to rest every few minutes. When she would dive under he would get a little frantic, look around, and dive behind her.

Free Orange Trashcans

CARE gave out 200 kits yesterday in 3 towns where they're building latrines. Kits include a 45 gallon orange trash can, of the kind that are used all over costal Peru to save water. The kits also had plastic plates and cups, soap, a smaller bucket with a faucet for saving boiled drinking water, a small pitcher, and a big CARE sticker to put on the giant orange trashcans.

It's 6 months after the earthquake but many, many communities still do not have a safe water source. The Municipal Government sends around a truck every so often, but it doesn't some at a regular interval so people are always very worried about having enough water. They were excited to be able to save another 45 gallons. The family of 6 that I lived with in Piura goes though more than 100 gallons in 2 days between washing, bathing, drinking, cooking and cleaning, and they're very conservative about the way that they use water. Being here is really an eye opening opportunity as to how much water human beings need to live.

In the first community we gave out 100 kits and it was madness and chaos. CARE made 240 latrines in that community in 240 different households. But, they only had 100 kits and gave them out on a first come first serve basis, on a weekday morning. There were many, many people waiting in the hot sun fighting and yelling that they should get the kit over their neighbor, that family X got 2 kits, etc... It was totally heartbreaking and a rather disappointing commentary on CARE's organizational skills. Ideally someone would have gone out there the day prior to sign up 100 families based on need. It's very hard to decide when everyone is in so much need, but as CARE executed the distribution the people who could advocate for themselves best got the most support, while the people who were not as able to advocate for themselves lost out and those folks are usually the worst off. When everyone has such dire needs it’s really hard to prioritize limited resources but what’s frustrating is that the resources shouldn’t really be so limited in a huge international aid organization like CARE. Distribution in the second and third communities went better because there were enough kits for all 70 households and in the 3rd community the CARE worker there had all 30 families signed up organized. It was much simpler and CARE met the expectations of all of the program participants. This is disappointingly unusual in aid work, so it was really great to see.

Another interesting part of the equation was that the kits apparently came from individual donors in the United States. The Project Manager started the distribution by giving a little talk explaining who CARE is and where the donations came from and people overwhelmingly grateful. At the end of the day we left the third community well after dark and much more humble for people's expressions of gratitude.

Festejo Music and Resilient Southerners

Here in costal southern Peru people lost houses, schools, public potable water, waste water systems, soccer stadiums, food, medicine, work, and just about everything after the earthquake. It was terrifying for a lot of children because it happened around 6pm and many parents were on their way home from afternoon work in the fields, so lots of kids were alone when it struck. Folks here are picking things up and starting over, poco a poco. They're even starting to have fiestas again.

This area, Cañete and especially Chincha are famous for Afro-Peruvian music, created by African slaves brought to Peru about 200 years ago. Chincha held an annual festival of Musica Negroide over the weekend and we were able to go and hear a mixture of Festejo, Negroide and Zapateo. The party didn't even get started until well after midnight when the band showed up. Revelers danced Zapateo around a yunsa, a tree, its branches filled with gifts that is cut down as part of the dance. When it falls everyone runs to the tree to collect the loot. We made friends with some fellow party-goers and apparent amateur stand-up comedians who have a vineyard and make their own Pisco, a kind of brandy typical of Peru that was named for the city just south of here. Hopefully, I'll report back about the flavor of their Pisco and grape picking soon!

Letrinas Ecologicas

Composting toilets are above the ground pit latrines that convert our poop into compost to be used on plants with large root systems i.e big trees, but not small edible plants i.e. your herb garden. Peace Corps as I understand it doesn't usually encourage composting toilets becasue when done incorrectly they can be a dangerous vector for disease. On the other hand, when done well they're much better than the dry pit latrines that we usually make becasue they do not result in a huge buried well of human excrement five years down the road when the latrine fills up and as long as they stay dry they're less gross than pit latrines along the way to compost.

Here in Cañete, Peru I'm spending a couple of weeks supporting CARE in some of their work reconstructing after the earthquake. I really like CARE as an organization and think that they do great work up in Piura where I live so I was excited to come down here. They're doing a whole latrines project, mostly with pit latrines and in some areas with waste water systems, regular bathrooms in towns that were lost all their buildings and infratructure in the earthquake on August 15, 2007. I'm working in some very poor communities right on the beach without waste water systems and with very high water tables, but where it almost never rains. If you dug a pit latrine it would fill with water even though we're basically in a desert. So, CARE is building above the ground composting toilets in those beach communties.

The model that CARE is using is really interesting. It has a about a four foot tall poured cement basin separated into two sections by a cement wall barrier. This empty cement cube is capped with a cemet top with one hole in each side, looking down into the poop chambers and on top is a little closet with a door where you can do your business. The kicker with composting toilets is that you want to poop to be very, very dry so you cannot pee in them, which is lame, inconvinenet and hard to get people to really do. So, this model comes with a prefab toilet that catches the urine and sends it out a pipe into a dranige field next to the latrine and lets the poop fall into the cement poop chamber. You use one side for about 6 months or until it fills up. Then, you let it sit and compost for 6 months while you move the toilet over to the other side and commence pooping. It's a very cool model.

Cañete with CARE

I'm spending a couple of weeks down in Cañete, a province of the department of Lima that was hit by the earthquake of August 15, 2007. A couple of other volunteers and I are working with CARE Peru to make some latrines and prepare people to take care of the latrines. We're also doing some basic hygiene education in health fairs in these little tiny beach towns. Today we're going to a community called San Pedro that is home to 23 families. We're going to play games like Jabon, Jabon, Microbio (Soap, soap, germ) a variaton of Duck, Duck, Goose and Flip cup with water to teach dehydration prevention. It should be fun.

CARE is building what they call Ecological Latrines in these little towns becasue they're on the beach and have a very high water table. These are composting toilets. I'm excited to see how they work and what people think of them. So far folks seems pretty into it. The families have to dig out their own drainage fields and clean up the latrine site as ther contribution to the project in order to get the latrine. They also have to help assemble and carry the pieces over to their houses. This is no small feat as it requires hauling plywood boxes that are about 8x8x6 from the assembly site to their houses on donkey carts without scratching, smashing, or otherwise damaging them.

More on how composting toilets work soon.