New areas: Puquina and Omate

I can't really believe that another week has flown by. We worked on reports and such things on Monday, and then Tuesday we took a 3 hour bus ride to a town called Puquina. An interesting thing occurred when the bus stopped, a national policeman got on board, and took everyone's fruit. They don't allow anything but bananas and one other fruit (pineapple?) past that point because they don't have any fruit flies and they don't want fruit flies getting in. I was reminded of the stations you stop at when entering California by car, and having them take some of our fruit on past family vacations. My teammates were all confused and didn't understand it. One in particular was very sad about the loss of her orange.When we arrived in Puquina, it was absolutely gorgeous. The whole valley of mountainsides had been terraced for farming, and I went a little crazy taking pictures. They'll probably all look the same when I look at them later, but I was really fascinated. I couldn't stop thinking about how much work must've gone into them. The people said the terraces have been there for a long time, they didn't know how much time. They just farmed on them. We finished the client satisfaction survey there the next morning. The biggest hitch we ran into was that we split up Wed. morning to cover more ground, and when Cam Nelson and I got to the area we had planned, we found that neither of us had brought the list of names we were supposed to search for. Going back was out of the question, because it had taken nearly 1.5 hours to get there and if we went back, we'd lose the morning, when people were still home. So we just found random Fondesurco clients and interviewed them, hoping we might happen upon some of the ones who were on our list, and then substitute others if necessary. The most important thing, we believe, is to get a random sample of the clients in the community, and we tried to get that.

Oh, gorgeous terracing...
Some houses.
Bright and early.
Cute little girl that hid her face when I pulled out my camera.
Wednesday afternoon we boarded a bus for the 2 hour ride to Omate, another small town where there is a Fondesurco office. We arrived and started working that afternoon, finding a few of the clients on our list. I'll mention that our lists have people from several different towns on them. Puquina happened to be easier to find the clients, but Omate was something of the opposite. The clients that had been randomly selected were from at least 10 different towns, and the towns were more spread out than other areas that we'd worked in. Thursday morning we worked really hard to find them and went to many different towns. Cam and I were together again, and went to the furthest town, only to find the the only client we were looking for had ironically gone to Omate to make his Fondesurco payment in the office. It was a rough morning for us, but the girls had more success on their run, and we still were able to get all the surveys done that we needed.

Here are some guys making adobe bricks.A woman who we got directions from. She was nice, and gave me some of her citrus fruit. It wasn't an orange or a lemon...it was just...in between. Kind of had no taste.
Cool white volcanic ash deposits against a red rock background.
Friday morning we boarded a bus back to Arequipa, which was full when we set off, and which stopped about three times in the next hour or two to pick up more passengers. They filled the entire aisle, and it was crowded. Gotta love the smell of way too many human bodies packed together on a hot, dusty bus, right? The 5-hour bus ride was almost entirely on dirt roads. I think the most enjoyable moment (with a somewhat satiric tone) was when we stopped for a lunch break, but while waiting for people to start squeezing out of the bus, a boy threw up 2 times before his mother could get him off the bus. It didn't smell fantastic, but fortunately the bus staff cleaned it up before we got going again. Another moment, more amusing, was when we were just outside of Arequipa and the bus suddenly stopped and everyone standing in the aisles had to get off quickly. It is illegal to have people standing in the aisles, and there was a police roadblock a little bit further on the road. So we passed the checkpoint and picked up all the people again further down, after the road looped. I say it was amusing because I chuckled, but it is also very sad to me that for one, that was probably the only bus that the people could take to Arequipa and so it was their only choice to crowd on in such a manner, and for two, people are made to be so desperate to make enough money that they ignore laws and make the ride more uncomfortable for all involved. It was an interesting ride, and I'm not in a hurry to take another one.