Making Progress!

What an incredible last month. We have all decided as we look back that in no other place is time as relative a thing as it seems to be in San Francisco, Peru. Over our long extended last month we were finally able to hit a bit of a rhythm and settle into the community. Making the decision to stay a little longer actually afforded us the time to accomplish a great amount with our class and the community.

The first and most exciting piece of news is that we´ve been able to finish our first round of Youth Health Promoter classes. The formal classes actually ended on an incredibly positive note, as we finished up with subjects related to sex, and pregnancy. I think that we all felt, given that we have 13 young teenage girls in our class,

that spending some extra time focusing on responsible decisions regarding sex was incredibly necessary. Of all of our classes I´d say that we got some of the most participation out of these lessons which was great to see. A real turning point came after our sex and STD class when we asked each student to go home and write some anonymous questions they had regarding sex. We were impressed when each student came to the following class with at least 2 questions. It really just enforced our understanding of how little education young people have access to in these communities in regards to sex, puberty and pregnancy.

After ending our set of lessons on a positive note, we spent two additional classes reviewing materials in preparation for our big final exam. At first we were all a little nervous to go back over our prior lessons and see just how much the students had retained, but after a couple days of review it seemed as though they´d been able to keep the majority of what we discussed. Though we haven´t yet been able to grade each exam we are all excited to return to San Francisco in a few days and tally up the results. Even though the tests have all been taken we still have several classes of project planning scheduled for our return. We have had many discussions with both the kids and members of the community related to our project and I think we are very enthusiastic to actually get down to some real ideas and planning.

 

Our return will also give us a chance to see how our group has done with their first unsupervised assignment. Before leaving we enlisted the help of our class and their parents, and were finally able to turn the hard rocky land in our communal garden into suitable beds for planting. We were thrilled to finally plant lettuce, cucumbers, cilantro and tomatoes. The real test will be seeing how all the veggies are doing, since we left it up to the kids to maintain and water the garden twice a day. We are hopeful that within the next week or two we will be able to turn the remaining beds and plant at least five more rows of veggies.

 

Though it has been nice to get in a bit of a break, we are excited to get back to the lives we have begun to create. Carly has taken off and is quickly becoming a master weaver, and I am looking forward to spending more time with Carmen and Leo helping attend to their cows after having been shown how to vaccinate livestock the other day.

 

¡Veggies are Delicious!

After living in San Francisco for a few months, we’ve come to realize that nutrition and health education here require necessary improvements and are some of the biggest issues at hand.

Most meals consist solely of white or beige colored foods. For example, a typical lunch meal includes white rice (made with saltwater, garlic and pig lard), boiled yuca and a fried egg. Soup is another common dish here that usually contains noodles, potatoes, herbs and packets of MSG. When you ask the average household why they don’t eat more vegetables, they say they ‘aren’t accustomed to them’. Although there is potential for a more colorful diet, they prefer their usual white and beige palettes instead. Curtis, Valerie and I are hopeful that with a little boost and lots of time, we can inspire change in the local diet.

After one couple donated us a plot of their land, we’ve been working hard with our little pueblo to create a community vegetable garden. Digging and tilling and digging more, we’ve started to create healthy and happy beds to plant our seeds in. The soil here requires constant watering and watching to make sure the local pollitos (chicks) don’t eat our baby plants (as we discovered they loved). As of now, we have lettuce, cucumbers, cilantro and tomatoes in the ground. And in another week or two, we hope to have the rest of the seeds planted, filling the community space with a large variety of veggies and herbs. Hopefully our hard work can inspire the village people with new and delicious edible options.

In addition to the Huerto Comunal, we’ve been working hard to bring health awareness to the kids in our class. With fun games, stories and lots of good tools, we’ve been helping them to better understand their bodies, nutrition, water/food intake, etc.

We hope with the classes, the garden and some extra side projects, we can see a positive change in the diets and lives of the people of San Francisco and possibly bring more variety and colors to San Francisco’s tables.

With the help of the community, we know anything is possible.

 

Having “The Talk” With Our Girls (and Jeffry)

Let me just start by saying, village life isn’t nearly as quiet and peaceful as we expected at times. This has been the week of fiestas – the usual Sunday soccer party, our neighbor Diana’s 9^th birthday, the fiesta of Las Reinas (the Queens) and this weekend a fiesta in celebration of Coyona, our neighboring village. I will have the music of rural Peru playing in my brain for months to come

Last Sunday we did the community clean-up project with the youth. We took the opportunity to put the planning of it in their hands to let them get some practice organizing a project and delegating responsibilities. They did an incredible job creating a plan and participating. They divided up into four teams and each chose a specific area of San Francisco to clean up. They were all in charge of spreading the word to family and friends and also made a public announcement over a loudspeaker. We collected sacks and sacks of trash – wrappers, old shoes, batteries, everything imaginable. As my team wandered over to pick up the trash behind one man’s home, I discovered that the trash was mired in a swampy pit of human waste – waste which is running through the center of town via a small creek and which animals were feeding on. The man who lives there is too elderly to walk far into the mountains for the “bathroom” and so has been simply using the small creek behind his home, probably for years. I knew that bathroom sanitation is our most serious health risk in San Francisco, but I didn’t realize that it was as bad as raw sewage literally running through the street. It’s sad to see a community which is progressing so rapidly in so many other ways suffering this kind of indignity. I hope that we can do something about this situation in particular in the next few months.

Recently Curtis and I taught the Sex Ed class to the kids. It was by far my favorite class that we’ve ever done with them. None of the girls have ever had any sex ed classes in high school and their parents have avoided any kind of discussion. So we both felt really motivated to talk with them about sex, gender roles, contraception and STDs. It’s probably the most important knowledge that we have to impart to a group of adolescent girls who have practically no access to information or adult guidance. And because it is a subject that they really want to understand, they were great at participating, asking questions and paying attention. It’s a big responsibility to be their only exposure to accurate knowledge at this moment. We made sure that they all know that our doors are open to come by and ask questions or talk in private and I really hope that they do drop by and talk to us. We’ll never know exactly what kind of effect this class has on their lives, but I sense that it’s this information more than anything else we teach that might really have a direct impact.

We’ll be back in a couple of weeks to update again. We are having a big dinner in Piura with my parents who will be visiting, Curtis and Carly, Rolando, Javier AND Zoila and Meli (my host family). I am so excited to have the opportunity to introduce my parents to Zoila and Meli and to make a special celebration of Meli’s 12^th birthday. It should be a wonderful culture-clashing, linguistically challenging event and an awesome opportunity to spoil my little sister. I’ll be heading off to Mancora to spend some time with my parents (!!!), but we should be wrapping up the final youth classes at that time and moving on to the much-awaited project planning

 

San Francisco, Part Two

Tomorrow morning Curtis, Carly and I will be bouncing our way back to San Francisco in the little camioneta that is our only means of transport. It will be a long trip, but I’m looking forward to seeing Zoila, Isaac and especially Meli and sharing all the veggies we bought here in the city. They give us fruit and coffee for free, and we bring back veggies and small necessities from Piura – people in San Francisco know how to share and I like being a part of that.

The two weeks that Curtis and Carly have been in SF have been an entirely different way of village life for me. And in a good way. Their new host family, Carmen and Leoncio, threw a huge fiesta their first day in the village. Life seems to have sped up with all of us there and we are really happy to be making so much progress. The classes with the youth are going so well. They are getting more and more relaxed and I feel like we have gained their trust. We’ve been incorporating lots of fun games and activities and that’s been great for building relationships with them. Curtis and Carly are naturally great teachers and it’s wonderful to have a team to work with.

The garden has also been an amazing project for the youth. We have already turned a very rundown, overgrown piece of land into a beautiful space. We have perfect rows of tilled land and a plan for the layout. We should be seeding in the next week. Carly is also coming up with creative activities for the kids to help us make the garden beautiful and organized.

In the coming weeks, we will be organizing a community clean-up day with the youth as they do their Medio Ambiente (Environment) class. Beautiful San Francisco is marred by scattered trash and a contaminated creek and we are hoping to make a positive and short-term impact on that, while also following the progress of the municipal government in considering landfill construction in the long-term. In just a few weeks, we should be wrapping up the general health knowledge classes and moving on to community project planning.

On a sadder note, a teenage boy from our town named Idel died unexpectedly last week. We think the cause was appendicitis, although no one is sure because the boy never managed to see a doctor. He died while walking for help in the night with his mother. It’s a sad reminder that preventable deaths are so common here in the remote areas of developing countries where access to health care is limited. We’ll keep his family in our thoughts.

 

Mountains, Cows & Kids

Back in the big city… who thought Piura would look so metropolitan? With all thats happened in between, it’s amazing to think that we were only just here 2 1/2 weeks ago.

San Francisco is incredible. In the month that Carly and I traveled throughout Peru prior to arriving there we never came across a place so iconic and beautiful. The ride from Piura to San Francisco was all the introduction we needed. I won’t go into it, but lets just say 6 hours sitting on a raised board hovering above a pickup truck stuffed with chickens and pigs, with 25 of your newest best friends straight up a mountain side was….well exciting.

The best part of our arrival to San Francisco was immediately getting to meet our new host family. Carmen and Leoncio are the sweetest people one can imagine. We live with them and their rambunctious 5 year old grandson, Brian. The first week we showed up just also happened to be the same time Leo’s father and two sisters were in town to visit. Since his father had not made it all the way to San Francisco for the last five years, Leo promptly decided to slaughter a cow (which was soon draped in pieces over every single free space in and outside the house) and host a fiesta.

I have to admit both Carly and I were pretty nervous to walk into the health post that first night and be introduced to our class for the first time. After having heard some feedback from Val that the kids were a little nervous to participate, we had decided that our first class would be best spent getting to know one another with some fun games and activities. It actually worked out perfectly because their homework from the previous class had been the Yo Soy, Adonde Voy activity (who I am, and where I am going). Carly and I started with our own renditions of who we saw ourselves as being and where we thought we were headed in the future. The kids loved it and immediately warmed up to participating once they saw what silly fools we were willing to make out of ourselves.

I don’t know what I’d expected out of the students, but I have to say that whatever it is they have exceeded my thoughts. They are all incredibly nice well behaved kids, and they seem eager to learn. That’s not to say that they aren’t at times disruptive, but what group of teenagers isn’t? They are as Val described slightly timid, but I can already see in the two weeks we’ve been there that they’ve started to lighten up a bit. The important thing is that they are all so bright and willing to learn.

The one glitch in our first two weeks spent in San Francisco came as a result of our project planning and coordination. The first weekend we were there Rolando came to visit and survey the community. The first night we held a basic introductory community meeting which was incredible well received. After that meeting a parent of one of the health promoters approached us to inquire more about the community project. After several discussions and some advice from Rolando, a last minute meeting was called with the parents to discuss the idea of making some headway on an idea to introduce toilets as a project. The thought is that since San Francisco had just recently received municipal sewage lines, that the next step would be to make a push to help the residents install toilets. Basically this meeting helped us to learn a valuable lesson in community organizing in Peru. Everyone more or less left with the impression that the meeting had been more than a discussion and that Mejor would be purchasing them toilets. Whoops. Though the idea of a toilet project is still a possibility, we all need to backtrack on some of the discussions we’ve had in order to remind everyone that no project is meant to move forward until the youth in our classes are given a chance to organize it.

None the less, we’ve already grown to love our lives in San Francisco. The constant bananas, oranges, handmade chocolate and fresh cheese which all the residents shower on us every time we cross the street, might help to give you an idea of the kindness and generosity with which we’ve been received.

 

Juntos en Peru!

The whole group! See the MEJORC Webpage for bios of each student!

Curtis and Carly are here!! I am so excited to share with them this experience of living and working in a rural Peruvian community. We actually bumped into each other a day early at a hotel in Piura and went for an amazing dinner of cebiche and lomo saltado – love the Peruvian food. We searched high and low until we found an amazing, affordable place to call our Piura home, wandered the market for hours, met Rolando and Javier for the first time and explored Piura a bit more. Curtis and Carly are full of fresh ideas, creativity and energy for the project, and we are all so enthused about what we are doing.

As for what’s happened in the last several weeks, Javier has finished processing the socio-economic data recently collected for San Francisco. We have 77 occupied homes, all made of adobe and all lacking electricity, with a total population of 283 people. Most striking and most inspiring is the jump in education of women in just one generation. The data shows that of mothers in San Francisco, 33 have received no education whatsoever, 37 attained primary level education and only 3 attended secondary school. Informally, I can say that virtually all youth here are now being educated in secondary school, although not all finish. I’m struck by the ambition of some of our students, children of barely educated mothers:  Malu (14 yr) wants to be an obstetrician, Meliza (11 yr) a nurse or a doctor, Marlis (13 yr) a teacher or a doctor.

We have completed 7 classes since my last update: Anatomy, Hygiene, Basic Illnesses, First Aid I and II, Communication and Self Esteem. Almost all of this information is new to the Youth Health Promoters, so it’s a lot to take in. Just in the last two classes, I have seen some change in the participation and comfort level of the students. Like any class, we have two or three students who are more confident and have always participated more willingly. The others have been challenging – timid and very embarrassed to participate except in the context of a game. The obstetrician who helped us with the Nutrition and Anatomy classes explained that a lack of self-confidence among students here in the remote sierra is very common – completely different from students in Piura or Lima who are exposed to more ideas, new people and active participation in school. We’d like to make outside-of-class activities a priority from now on– getting to know each other better, building trust and having fun.

Our originally planned trip to the two high schools of the Youth Health Promoters (Coyona and Barrios) to inform both teachers and students about our project was delayed by a three week national school vacation because of swine flu. However, we are planning to go to both schools in the coming week and it will be the first opportunity the youth have had to speak about the project publicly. We are also moving forward on our community vegetable garden! The profe has advised us on what is best to grow in this area and offered to raise the seeds until they are seedlings. While here in Piura, we are going to buy seeds and a hose. Once we have seedlings we will prepare the land as a group and set up a watering schedule with the youth. I think this is a wonderful opportunity to start working with our Health Promoters outside of the classroom, completing a project which will be lots of fun and will definitely make a positive difference in community nutrition.

We are slowly, but steadily navigating bureaucracy in pursuit of a landfill. The district of Canchaque has a technical expert who is willing to come to San Francisco in August to survey the land and explore appropriate and environmentally safe locations for the landfill. We are also brainstorming more about the logistics of a recycling program. I have really high hopes that we will move forward on implementing a reasonable waste management system. People in San Francisco deserve better than to have to live with their trash in the streets and contaminating the creeks.

All in all, I feel confident that the project is progressing successfully. I know that projects and ideas are going to speed up even more now that we have our entire MEJOR Communities team here and I can’t wait to see where the opportunities take us.

 

Bienvenidos a Piura!!!

Piura!!! We´re all finally together at last. Carly and I arrived here a couple days ago after traveling most of Peruvian north coast. The funniest thing of all is that it only took about one hour after we´d arrived in Piura to run into none other than Valerie Scott. After checking into our hostal, we were on our way to our room and bang…there she was. It was the warmest greeting ever.

Since running head first into Val, we´ve been taking in Piura, buying supplies and gifts at the incredible outdoor market, and meeting with Rolando and Javier in order to go over the details of our next set of classes. Yesterday was our first get together with both Rolando and Javier and I can´t begin to say how lucky we are to be working with two such well rounded and experienced guys. It was a treat to get a chance to hear the kinds of project experience that Rolando has had over the course of the last 25 years. From disaster relief, to community organizing, to education programs; Mihras Peru has worked in so many capacities including governmental and NGO´s.  As a member of MEJOR Communuties, I can say that we are incredibly grateful to have such a capable partner. Of course my opinion of Rolando and his organization wouldn´t have been at all swayed buy the incredible lunch of ceviche he treated us to yesterday.

Without question the most exciting thing that´s happened to us since getting to Piura, has been the opportunity to finally catch up with Val and hear everything she has to say about her experiences in San Francisco. From what she´s let on so far SF sounds ideal. Seems like compared to some of the problems we were expecting (ie. extreme alcoholism, malnutrition, and prevalent illness) things in SF might be slightly more copacetic. The biggest concerns we´ve discussed in relation to the classes seem to be general problems with participation.  According to Val, getting the kids to open up has been slightly more difficult than we´d predicted. I think because of this we are planning on slowing down a bit and dedicating just a few extra classes to group activities.

We´re so excited to meet our new host family tomorrow. We´ve been told Carmen and her family are incredibly sweet. The three of us spent most of the day shopping for gifts for them at the market today as well as hose for our new garden which we hope to begin working on this coming week.

Tomorrow is a big day…up at 5am for our 5hr. truck ride up to SF and then time to settle into our new lives. Wish us buen suerte!!!

 

Hola Amigos!

Carly and Curtis in Huanchaco Peru

Hola de Peru! Curtis and I have successfully made it here after much preparation and anticipation. We just arrived in Cajamarca in the Northern region of Peru, after breifly visiting the cities of Lima and Trujillo. We will spend a few days here before embarking on our journey to Piura and then out to the rural community of San Francisco, where we´ll be working.

We are thrilled to be here exchanging moments with the locals and other travelers. So far we have only encountered kindness and hospitality everywhere we go–and lots of ice cream! We are looking forward to sharing our lives with our new friends in SF soon and working together to accomplish similar goals.

The program, MEJOR Communities, has prepared us well for an exciting adventure; one full of important lessons on health, community building and much more. We are so happy to know the young people in the SF community are equally as excited to learn new things.

We are beginning our journey with open minds and hearts in anticipation of sharing ourselves fully with our new community. Wish us luck! We´ll update you again soon. Viva Peru!

 

Hola Desde Un Portland Muy Caliente

Hi everyone. I’d say it’s about time for an introduction. Up until now, Carly and I have been anxiously waiting while we follow Valerie’s posts. Though we won’t be meeting up with Val and beginning our stay in San Francisco until the end of August, we will be arriving in Lima in just five days! Of course it seems like only last week that we were telling people we’d be heading off to Peru in four months…where does the time go?

I can’t help but be incredibly impressed, reading about all the unbelievable progress Val has made in such a short amount of time. I am so proud and grateful that she has been willing to go down to Peru ahead of us and face the challenge of doing a very difficult thing all on her own. Up until her last posting, it had been somewhat tough to envision what our lives in San Francisco would be like. Yet after reading her reports on Piura, Peru, misty rivers, the pace of the town, and the responsiveness of students, parents and community members, I feel like we have an incredibly well informed idea of what we’re getting ourselves into.

My favorite is that progress has already begun on both surveying the community and also getting opinions for a group project. It will be exciting to see how the statistical data we collect will change through our impact on the youth health promoters and their families. It also sounds like community members are almost as excited about working towards a project as we are. The idea of setting up some sort of waste management program or system seems like a wonderful idea. I think we often forget how living in a clean environment can impact people’s mental and physical health.

Both Carly and I are excited to bring our creative talents and experiences to San Francisco, Peru. We have worked with and taught children from Cambodia to Costa Rica. From an experiential standpoint, my focus has always been on politics, community organizing and nonprofit management. I’ve worked professionally in a variety of local and global environments. Carly certainly represents the creative talent amongst us. She recently received her BFA in Metalsmithing from the Oregon College of Art and Craft. In the past, Carly has taught art classes in Portland-based inner-city youth programs and has volunteered herself with other art and community based organizations. She is incredibly anxious to share her artistic talents with the children and people of San Francisco, Peru as well as become a student once again.

We both have a lot of ducks to get in a row between now and Monday, but with a little extra sweat on our brow (currently 105 degrees today as Portland experiences a record heat wave) we should be able to make it all work. We’ve got heads full of hopes and ideas which will soon enough be put to the test. Can’t wait to give you all the next update from Peru!!!

Curtis y Carly

 

The Classes Begin

A lot has been happening in San Francisco in the last couple of weeks! The youth health promoters and I are starting to get in the swing of things with the classes. So far we’ve completed an initial exam to determine a baseline of their knowledge about health and covered the first three classes (Salud Integral, Educacion y Nutricion). Katie and Roberto have done a great job of making the curriculum both informative and fun. I really enjoy preparing for the classes and teaching them twice a week with the help of Javier, the health tech in San Francisco.

The health promoters are eager and enthusiastic to learn – I know that they will accomplish great things in the community through this project. The biggest challenge at the moment is the shyness of the promoters. They are often reluctant to offer answers to questions in front of the group – even ones they know the answers to. This is something that I’m sure will ease with time, as they become more comfortable with me and with the participatory style of the health classes.  We have a focus in the curriculum on self-esteem, communication skills and leadership which I think is very important to empower them to be leaders in health.

We just had our class on Buena Nutricion last Friday. We learned about the three major food groups of Energia, Proteccion y Constructor and how to eat balanced meals with foods from all three groups. We were lucky to have an obstetrician from Coyona in town who helped me to explain vitamin deficiencies and how to prevent them. It was really interesting to hear her perspective as a doctor familiar with the area. Vitamin A deficiency is the most common deficiency in San Francisco. I’m hoping that we can address some of the vitamin deficiencies with a community vegetable garden (huerto) that we are starting!

A local resident of San Francisco has donated a large piece of land to our project and the health promoters are excited about starting our first small project. In our nutrition class they helped me compile a list of vegetables they’d like to grow. We are thinking: lettuce, carrot, cabbage, tomato, onion, beets, coriander……..We are thinking a lot of things because I am hungry for some color in my diet and I think they are too. The lack of vegetables in San Francisco is really striking. We get LOTS of yummy rice and juicy bananas and oranges and even some protein (eggs and the occasional bit of pork or chicken), but veggies – almost nada.

I went to the market today to buy seeds for our huerto. I just bought a small packet of carrot and lettuce seeds to test before buying all my seeds from one vendor.  I have three more weeks in San Francisco (before returning to meet Curtis and Carly!), so we’ll begin moving richer soil from the chacras to the garden until I buy the rest of our seeds. I also want to petition the advice of the profe (teacher) who has a beautiful vegetable garden about what’s best to plant in our space.

All in all, things are progressing beautifully and by the time I update next, we will be at the half-way point of our youth health classes and Curtis and Carly will have arrived!