Jauja

We started on Jauja, our third city, on Monday, May 26 during the day. It's about 45 minutes north of Huancayo. We returned to Huancayo to finish that evening, then moved up to Jauja on Tuesday to stay for a few days. Jauja was interesting...the work has progressed just fine, but we've had a couple of interesting experiences, especially Wednesday night and Thursday. First, our hotel (if we want to call it that) said it had hot water, but we found it to be a lucky moment if the water was turned on at all. Second of all, the shower had no curtain and was rather ghetto looking to begin with. I just won't let anyone in on the fact that I didn't shower for two days because of that... I took a video with my camera...

This is a picture of my door at our second hotel. So, different hotel, but amusing just the same.

Some of our typical transportation in the city.

Or outside the city. They're both motorcycles, or at least the front half. The back part has a seat for 2 (or 3, squished).

Our adventures continued when we went out to a city about 30 minutes away last night, and didn't find the woman because she wasn't home. And this is after we hiked out into the countryside for 15 minutes. So we trekked back and then went to a city on the way back to Jauja called Huertas, and began looking for a woman there. (It was dark by the time we got there, and usually we try to finish up by dark, though it's tricky since they don't do daylight savings time here and it's dark by 6:00 pm.) No one in the small city plaza knew who it was, but one man volunteered to take us to look for her and her street. After walking about 20 minutes away from the main road, we arrived at a smaller plaza where there were some more people. No one there knew who the woman was that we were looking for either, but our friend rode his bike off the the home of someone in the community who knew most everyone. Meanwhile, I called our PRISMA contact in Jauja to ask, and he said, "Oh, you'll never find her by yourselves." I then wondered why on earth he told me earlier that day that I could find her that afternoon... When our friend came back, he still didn't have information about the woman, but said that there was someone else by the same last name, so we could check there. So after another 10 minutes of walking (away from the main road), we knocked on the house, and it so happened that the woman that answered was the one we were looking for! So it was a stroke of good luck. After we finished the survey, however, we realized how dark it was at 7:40 there, and we were also startled by a man who began approaching us. It turned out that he was really only going to the house that we had just left, but we hurried down the street anyway, watching our backs. After wandering in the direction of the main road, but only finding roads darker than we wanted, we changed directions and walked until we found a small store. The woman there gave us directions to the main road, where we could grab a car back to Jauja. I asked her if there was any danger to walking there at 8 pm, and she said, "No, not until at least 9 or 10." My slight worry was not soothed... But in the end, we did make it back to the road and then to Jauja without a problem. In Jauja I dropped the dozen or so rocks that I had put into my sweatshirt pocket just in case of something unexpected. :)

The next adventure I shall mention is simply that my partner Chelsea didn't feel all so well on Thursday, and ended up losing her lunch (actually, the one from the day before) while we were interviewing a PRISMA client. Fortunately, he was very understanding and helpful!

We were able to finish up Jauja Friday morning. Which reminds me of one more story I could mention: our PRISMA contact in Jauja, while very nice, was also a bit of a flake with time. Thursday, we were supposed to meet at 6:30 am at our hotel to head out to 3 cities, where we had a food security survey (15 min) in one and an in-depth interview (45 min) in each of the others, and José (the contact) had said himself that we should get there early in order to catch them before they went out to their chacras (fields). Well, at 6:40, I called José and he said he was on his way. At 7:15, he rolls up and asks if we're ready to go. "Yes, quite," we think to ourselves. So we headed out. We ended up only finding two of the clients and only having time to do the short survey with each of them. One of them said, "If you had come earlier, I would've had plenty of time for the interview!" Yeah, I know. We didn't find the other man we were looking for because he had already left for his chacra. Such is life! But the story continues. We invited José to eat lunch three times: once Wednesday and twice on Thursday, and he skipped out each time either to play soccer or eat somewhere else. Oh well, his loss! And lastly, we were to meet at the PRISMA office in Jauja at 9:45 am on Friday to go meet a group of clients at 10:00 and do our last focus group for the Jauja area. José was a no show. So we got the city location and the names of the clients from the receptionist, and headed off on our own. We found the city, and fortunately the group as well, without too much trouble. We introduced ourselves and asked them if we could have a discussion with them as they waited for José, who was already 30 minutes late. They were happy to start. We had a wonderful discussion and then shared some refreshments with them, and then said goodbye and good luck at 11:45. José's whereabouts were still unknown. If anyone knows exactly how Peruvian time works, do let me know! Though the client group seemed to like the "on-time" idea...

Anyway, that's it for Jauja. Here are a couple of pictures.
The first is of the church in the main square of Jauja. To the right you can see a yellow sign. That was our first hotel.
Here is some landscape a little ways outside of Jauja, but a typical small town in rural Peru, and a typical plant of the area.

This is a pile of charcoal burning, and they cook a food called Pachamanca in there. I never actually tried it, but people said it was great.