Aaaaand...Arequipa! Beginning with FONDESURCO:

So, we arrived in Arequipa. It wasn't a really long stay, only a couple of days. We arrived Sunday morning, June 8, around 10 am. After arriving at our hotel, we freshened up a bit, got ready for church, and headed out to find a ward. A taxi driver knew where one was, and we got there at 11. I thought we'd probably make it right on time for a ward, but it turns out the ward started at 10, so we had missed sacrament meeting. But we were able to make it for the rest of the meeting.
On Monday, we met with Luís García, the Freedom from Hunger employee here in Peru, and we headed over to the FONDESURCO office. FONDESURCO is a non-governmental organization based here in Arequipa that provides loans to people with less requirements than many other institutions, and has fairly competitive rates compared with others. FONDESURCO is not yet a partner of Freedom from Hunger, as PRISMA was, and so we are doing a market research study so that they can expand their client base and know more about the communities that they serve. There at their office, we laid out a plan for the next few weeks: we were heading out to Juliaca for the rest of that week, then coming back to Arequipa to meet with FONDESURCO staff to head out to Valle de Tambo for a week, and the week after that we'd head to the Valle de Colca. So we made some more plans about how we were going to carry out the market research study that we had planned. In each area, we were going to do 24 focus groups (later reduced to 16, since we realized that we had overplanned) in various cities of the community. It was a little bit staggering when I realized how many we were to do, since in about two weeks with PRISMA we had only done 10 focus groups total, and I had only been present for a little over half of them. Focus groups are great tools, but require a lot of work to talk about everything. So we were planning on 24 in four days, three different times. The focus groups that we had planned were different from the ones I described with PRISMA. Those two were Seasonality and Well-Being Pile Sorting, the first of which was a calendar of when they experienced shortages of food, seasons of sickness, seasons of savings, and of migration in or out of their communities, and the second of which had them divide the people in their community into classes, and then describe each class according to their relative wealth and status, as well as type of food, type of work, etc. The three we had planned for the market study with FONDESURCO are a Seasonality calendar (different), a Financial Services Matrix, and an Analysis of Incomes and Expenditures in the home. The first is a more extensive calendar of the seasonality of their expenditures, income, migration, loans, and money sent home from members living in other parts. The calendar helps us understand the reality and the lives of the people in each community. The second tool is a matrix of what financial services are available in each area, and what kinds of people have access to those services. And the third tool helps us understand what kinds of work are available in each area and who (between men and women) does the work for each kind of work, and then an analysis of what kind of expenditures they have during their year and who in the family is responsible for saving for each kind of expenditure, and who takes charge of what expense. So, with these three tools, we boarded a bus on Tuesday morning and headed out towards Juliaca.

The drive, as we climbed into the Andes mountains once again, was really beautiful. The climate was quite dry looking, but it was still very interesting.