Acarí and Nazca; the last leg of field work

On Monday of this past week, we boarded a bus to Acarí at 5:30 (not leaving till 6), a small town which took us 10 hours to get to. So I spent the first part of Monday driving down to the bus station to pay for our tickets before the reservation ran out of time, and then I went with one of the girls of our group to the house of a member family here in Arequipa, where we helped (a little) make lunch and then ate. It was really quite good, we made mashed potatoes and a chicken...dish... It was a sauce made out of tomatoes, a little bit of onion, peas, and a few other things into which we put the chicken and then let it boil for 30 minutes. I'd love to say I figured out how we really did it, but I missed out on some details. It was, however, very good. We had an interesting conversation with the family, who actually lived in Salt Lake for about a decade.

After lunch we went back to the hotel, packed up our things, and went to the bus station again to head off. It got dark as we rode, and after watching a really strange karate movie about a Chinese guy that gets exiled to somewhere in Europe, I tried to fall asleep, which proved fairly difficult in that bus. A long while later, we arrived in Acarí at 4 am, found the hotel where we had a reservation, and crashed into bed. I got up at 10:45, and we met at the FONDESURCO office at 11, and went straight to work. I ended up only doing one survey that day, but the girls on their rounds found quite a few more. I worked on our report of the market study, (which is due this coming week), for about 11 hours that day. Don't anybody do the math for my activities that day! I and the 2 girls also went to a Catholic mass with our FONDESURCO fellow employees in the evening, the organization was recognized in the prayer that was given. I guess that particular church recognizes certain families or companies every so often, because we were one of 3 companies/organizations that were prayed for. The mass was interesting, and the priest also had a powerpoint lesson about one of the 10 commandments. Afterwards, FONDESURCO provided hot chocolate.

I found some orange corn this time.Hey.
Cotton fields...I was surprised.
Wednesday morning the girls finished the rest of the surveys while Cam and I worked on the report some more, and then we took off from Acarí at 10 am in a car to head to Nazca, about 1.5 hours north. It's an interesting, very touristy town. Probably about 30,000 people, we spent a few days here working on reports and also doing a few touristy things ourselves. We saw a movie about the Nazca lines, and then went to a metal tower from which you can see a few of the lines. The Nazca lines are mysterious lines and figures in the desert just northwest of the city, which were made by moving the dark rocks of this rocky desert to the side, exposing the white ground underneath. It is believed that they were made somewhere between 300 BC and 600 AD, and they are still existent, despite their simple and fragile nature, due to the extremely dry climate here, claimed to be one of the driest climates in the world. I recommend reading the Wikipedia article about the lines if you'd like to learn more. The lines are still considered a mystery today, because no one knows really who made them or why, nor how, since the lines can only really be seen from above, by airplane. So they are something of an enigma. We also visited some ruins outside the city, and some extremely old wells that access an underground water spring. On Saturday, Carly and Cam boarded a bus to Lima, because Carly is meeting up with her Dad, who is coming down to accompany his daughter for the last week when we visit Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Cam is actually heading home on July 31, so he's going to work in Lima till he flies out. Chelsea and I are still in Nazca, but we take an overnight bus tonight to head back to Arequipa, where we will finish up the work for FONDESURCO, coordinating with Cam and Carly over the internet.

Carly and Chelsea, waiting to order some food.Ruins near Nazca. Possibly Incan.
A really, really old well.
Yesterday, Chelsea and I went sandboarding. We took off at 7 am, riding a taxi for 30 minutes to the tallest sand dune in the world, and then followed our guide on a 2.5 hour hike up some mountains and then up the dune. It was pretty hot! It's kind of random, the dune, because there's only the one. But it is monstrous! So we hiked to the top, and then sandboarded down. It is the same idea as snowboarding, but is rather different to try to do in the sand. (So said Chelsea, she is a snowboarder while I have never tried it.) We had to scrape wax on the bottom of the boards every so often, and truthfully, it was really rather tiring to head down the mountain on a board, and it was a hard workout on the legs! It was an interesting experience. After we went as far down as you can go, we hiked off the dune and back out to the nearest part of the road for about an hour, where our taxi picked us back up. I don't know if I'd go again, but it was something to try!It was an eventful week. We only have a few more days of work for FONDESURCO, and then we'll be done. I still have some cultural assignments for school to do, and then it's tourism in Cuzco and Machu Picchu until the end! I'm a little in disbelief that there are only 2 weeks left. It has been a wonderful experience, and also a lot of hard work.

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.

Heading back: Tambo and Colca

(PICTURES FORTHCOMING)

After the week of working on the information for the market study, we headed back out to begin the next stage of our work for FONDESURCO, which is a client satisfaction survey. This is really similar to what we did for PRISMA, in that we are looking for a list of existing clients to survey. For PRISMA, it was a food security survey to know what kind of hunger they face, but this one with FONDESURCO is interviewing them to find out their level of satisfaction with the loans and services offered. It is rather easy to administer, but the trick is finding the people that we are looking for. We have a list of 38 people, and we need to find 19 of them. So far, the clients have been spread out in 5-8 different cities in each area, and coordinating travel can be tricky, hand in hand with the difficulty of actually finding the people when they are home.

We headed back out to the Valle de Tambo to begin the survey on Monday, July 7, and got to work immediately. (Cam Nelson wasn't with us, because the previous Friday he had gone to Cuzco to help 2 students out there settle in with some organizations to do internships for about a month. They were part of the group of students that had gone to Bolivia, but their internships had struggled and in the end fallen through, so those two had come to Cuzco to work with other organizations that Cam had contacted.) So we worked that day and got a few done. Tuesday morning we were woken up in our hotel rooms by a small earthquake at 4:10 am. I woke up and just thought that it was kind of neat and exciting. It lasted 15-20 seconds, at least to my recollection. Later, we learned that at the epicenter it measured more than 6 on the Richter scale, and that it even made news in the US. On Tuesday, we went back out and worked on finding people and giving them the survey. Cam arrived at some point and joined us. We worked in the afternoon, and by 7 pm or so had found all that we needed to find. I went back to the hotel to meet up with the other 3 students, and when they found that I had gotten the rest, we made a lightning decision to head out that night and try and catch the bus to Arequipa. It was late, but we did this because the next day was some sort of national strike, and there wasn't going to be any way to travel to Arequipa. It was kind of exciting, leaving on such an unexpected decision. So we were able to finish up all the surveys in two days.

Wednesday was spent in Arequipa, resting and working on the report of the market study for FONDESURCO.

Thursday morning we left in the truck once again, this time with David Álvarez, one of the analysts working in Colca. He had become our friend the first time we went there, and he was very helpful this second time around as well. All of the Colca staff were, really, and we were able to finish everything up by Friday afternoon and drive back to Arequipa. One interesting experience I had was going to Tuti in a small minivan bus (called a combi here), a small town an hour away, looking for a client on our list. Fortunately, I found the client almost immediately. On the way back, in the same combi, I chatted with a young boy doing a word search as part of his homework, and with some young girls who were also heading home from school. They all thought it was interesting to talk to a gringo. At one point of the hour-long ride, we passed a group white tourists, and I called out "Gringos!" because a lot of the Peruvians in the bus were looking at them out the window. They all laughed at my joke, (my pointing out the fact and terming them gringos, when I myself am a gringo), and I was pleased. Another funny story from our efforts here in Colca was when Carly, Chelsea, and I were sitting in the truck waiting for David to do some business of his own, and we saw an older Peruvian man leading his donkey off to work, but the donkey wasn't in a cooperative mood and kept stopping. Each time this happened, the man would desasperatedly yell "Burro!" We knew it must have been frustrating for him, but it was funny to hear him call out "burro" so many times.

So that was our first week of the client satisfaction survey work, and we're glad that we were able to get it done quickly in each area so far.

On Saturday the 12th of June, back in Arequipa, we did some work and also went and played soccer with the FONDESURCO staff, which was enjoyable. It was also refreshed in my mind how much better Latin Americans are at soccer than us silly gringos!

A week in Arequipa

We spent a week in Arequipa, the second largest city in Peru, compiling information, analyzing it, and writing reports. On Monday, June 30, we did some touring around Arequipa as a group, along with Kirk Dearden. We saw a few sights and learned about the 3 volcanoes that surround the valley. The most famous one is El Misti. None of the volcanoes are active.In the Plaza de Armas.
El Misti.
Llamas!
El Misti.
Chelsea, Carly, and Cam Nelson.
The rest of the week, like I said, was a lot of work on the information that we'd compiled with the previous 3 weeks of focus groups discussions. We also found out what information we still lacked and got an idea of how much work we had to do in order to write up the big report for FONDESURCO.

Highlights from this week? One night we went to dinner with Luís García, eating pizza. Not really a highlight, but noteworthy, I got sick this week and on Friday slept until 3 in the afternoon. It was...not the funnest! But I still found the energy that evening to go out to dinner with the girls, Luís, and his 2 daughters ages 10 and 12, if I remember right.

Anyway, a week of a lot of work but also with enjoyable moments. As a group, we all came to an agreement that Arequipa was a very beautiful city, and we enjoyed having it as something of a home that we returned to each weekend so far, as well as the entire past week here.

Colca

We headed up to Colca, a valley about 2.5 hours northeast of Arequipa, on Monday, June 23 in the evening. We rode in the same truck, but with a different employee named Modesto. He works in the Colca agency, which is located in Chivay. We stayed in Chivay most of the week, travelling to the cities each day where we carried out our focus groups. The 4 days that we worked here were very similar to the 4 that we worked in Tambo the previous week. On Tuesday we held our discussion in a large communal building of Chivay. Wednesday, we travelled 2 hours to a small city named Callalli, holding our discussion and then heading back to Chivay. On Thursday we drove to a town called Cabanaconde, two hours along a steep canyon road, with beautiful scenery on the valley hills. About 30 minutes before arriving at Cabanaconde, we stopped and took pictures at the Cañón del Colca, claimed to be the deepest canyon in the world. It certainly was deep and steep. We stayed that night in Cabanaconde, and then drove the next day to Huambo, our last city for doing focus groups.

Aren't we good looking?
Terraced farmland.
Looking down into the Cañón.
Pretty cool terraced farmland.
Highlights from Colca include two trips to two different hot springs. There are a lot of hot springs in the area because of the volcanic activity (obviously, I guess), and they were enjoyable. The first was on the evening of the day we got there, and the second trip was on Saturday morning, when Cam Nelson, Kirk Dearden, (a friend of ours, former BYU professor in charge of this very internship, and current Boston University professor doing research in Lima), and I all woke up at 4:30 am to head to the hot springs. It was early, but we got to see the stars and then watch the sky get brighter and brighter with the sunrise. Then, later that morning, we took another visit to the Cañón de Colca so that Kirk could see it. I don't know about the deepest canyon in the world, though... They say that from the top of the mountain next to it down to the bottom of the canyon is a 3,500 foot drop or so. They say it's twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.
A condor, definitely one of the symbols of the culture there.
Hey, corn!
After hiking partway down the canyon.
This week in Colca was interesting, and somewhat joyous for us in the sense of being able to finish up all the focus group discussions we had planned. I said in an earlier post that they were great tools, but required a lot of work. I stick with that! So it was a good experience to spend three weeks doing them, but it certainly was a lot of work carrying them out and then expanding our notes on them afterwards. We did 48 focus group discussions total.

After visiting the Cañón, we took an afternoon bus back to Arequipa and spent the night there with Kirk. On Sunday, June 29, we attended church, and in the evening watched a movie called "Something the Lord Made" (I think), about the first open heart surgeries to help "blue babies." It was also the story of the assistant of the doctor who became famous for the surgeries, who (the assistant) was black and not allowed to become a doctor himself. It took place in the 1950's, I believe. It was a very interesting movie.

Valle del Tambo

We arrived back from Juliaca on Monday, June 16, in the early afternoon. After spending a few hours in the FONDESURCO main office, we headed out at about 6 pm in a truck owned by FONDESURCO, driven by one of the credit analysts who works in the Valle de Tambo agency. I slept part of that ride without even meaning to fall asleep.

We arrived in Cocachacra, a small city in the Valle de Tambo where the FONDESURCO agency is located, around 8:30 pm, and stayed in this city all week as we did the work. Here in the Valle de Tambo, we had a bit of a changeup in how we did our work. The instructions on how we wanted our focus groups with the people set up got a little mixed up somewhere along the way, and the manner in which the employees in the Valle de Tambo office set it up was to have one large gathering each evening at 5 or 6 after the work day was over, to which 60-100 women showed up, and then each of us 4 students took a part of the group and did a discussion with them. They gathered the women by announcing the meeting earlier in the day with a loudspeaker strapped to the truck. This new way of working was tricky for us because we were used to having 2 of us working with 10-15 participants, but we were forced to work alone with a group of 20-30 women. It was a little out of hand! But we just did the best that we could with what we ended up with, and that is how we did the work for four evenings. The first evening we worked in a town called El Arenal, the second evening in Cocachacra (where the FONDESURCO agency is located), the third in Alto Ensenada, and the fourth in Punta de Bombón. Each evening after we students had finished our discussions, the FONDESURCO employees held a drawing, giving out several pots and a grand prize of a portable cooking stove. They usually had us draw the numbers in the drawing, because the people liked it. It was fun and interesting, although we students later agreed it was a little awkward to be the focus of a publicity stunt for FONDESURCO in that way. Each night after the discussions and drawings, the employees signed new clients up for loans.

Highlights from this week's visit to the Valle de Tambo include an experience that I had with Henderson, a Peruvian from Lima that was working in that area and staying in the same hotel. He'd already been there for several weeks, and had several more to go. He is an archeologist, and works for a firm in Lima. Their main work is getting hired by the government or by companies who are building things, and they identify archealogical sites that shouldn't be destroyed. There is a surprising amount of archealogical evidence here in Peru. Anyway, I met him the second night we were there, and we chatted for quite a long time. We talked about many things in Peru and archealogical sites of interest, and I asked him what I should visit when I go to Cuzco at the end of our trip. We also shared details about our work, as well as our families and personal lives, and I talked to him a little bit about the Church. A couple nights later, I had a longer talk with him about the Church, and talked about the Restoration and more of our beliefs. He was very friendly, and maybe in the future will have more interest. I would've given him a Book of Mormon, but didn't have one to give away at that moment.

Another highlight of Tambo was on Thursday, when we saw bats flying around in Alto Ensenada, and on Friday of that week Luís Urquizo, one of the FONDESURCO workers, took us around the valley in their truck, and showed us some sights. He also took us to the beach, where we took pictures and touched the water, but didn't go swimming. It's too cold! This was a neat place, I liked it here.

Here's some ají pepper.And here are some of the sights.
And the beach.
We headed back to Arequipa with Luís in the truck on Saturday morning, and spent the weekend there.

Hoolee-aca

We had a great week in Juliaca - by great I mean that it was pretty effecient. It was also quite tiring, actually! We arrived Tuesday afternoon and settled into our hotel. Because the Royal Inn (that is really the name) didn't have two rooms with two twin beds, Cam Nelson and I took the one that they had and the girls got a matrimonial suite. They had a king-size bed and a bathroom with a jacuzzi. They were both pretty excited about that, and I think one of them tried to take a bath later but alas, there was no hot water, nor was there much water pressure. I can't say I'm surprised... :)
Wednesday and Thursday we went out to Cabana and Cabanillas, respectively, and in each of those communities we went out to smaller settlements of people and did 6 focus group discussions each day. We travelled together, but in each of the 3 smaller settlements we split into 2 partnerships of 2 and thus did two discussions in each place. It worked well, although it was a lot of work. One of the partners leads the discussion and digs for information from the people, while the other takes vigorous notes. Some of the discussions we also recorded with voice recorders (that sounds redundant?) and listened to them later to beef up our notes a little more. So we racked up 12 discussions in a short period of time. Although after the discussion, we needed to spend up to an hour per discussion going back through the notes and writing down anything we could remember we missed. So while good, it was an extensive process.

Here are some shots from the countryside.

Friday we had hoped for 6 more discussions, but the partner organization Fondesurco was working through said they didn't have enough notice and also it was a festival of some sort, so we got the day off. We took advantage of the time and took a bus down to Puno, a city sprawling up some hills next to the northwestern end of Lake Titicaca. The lake is the highest freshwater lake in the world, speaking about altitude. I guess there's not many other terms I could've really meant...the lake's not high on drugs... Anyway, it was quite pretty. The water was a deep, dark blue. Three of us decided to take a tourist boat ride out to the floating islands, which are islands that are made entirely out of reeds that grow profusely in the lake there. They also make their homes and boats out of the reeds. Almost everything, in short. It was interesting, although very touristy, and after they explained how the islands are made, and how they eat a part of the reeds and fish for food (and take a boat into town for most other things), they kept us in one little part of the island and tried to convince us to buy their souvenirs. Our boat wouldn't leave for nearly half an hour, and they even tried to tell us we had to spend even more money than what we had already paid to have them row us to another island on one of the boats made out of reeds. But we told them no, we'd already paid the fee for the motorboat. They didn't want to let us do that, but we didn't want to spend any more money. So the motorboat finally did leave, and took us to the other island anyway, where there was...more souvenirs and people trying to sell them to us! There was also a restaurant, but none of us three wanted to eat, so we sat down on the reed-ground or reed-benches and napped and read books for around an hour. When our boat finally departed and headed back to Puno, we met back up with Chelsea, who had stayed there waiting. We all thought it would be an hour and a half or so, but we arrived back a little more than 3 hours later. She, meanwhile, had had an interesting experience with an evangelical minister talking to her about all sorts of things and condemning her for her religion for much longer than she wanted, considering she didn't even ask him to talk to her - he had just seen her reading her scriptures. Anyway, it was an interesting and fun experience to spend part of the day in Puno and on the floating Islas de los Uros.

Saturday we conducted a few more focus group discussions in Santa Lucía, another city near Juliaca. Sunday, we headed off to the church in Juliaca, or at least one of them. There we met a pair of sister missionaries, and one of them was from Salt Lake. So Cam and I (as we're both from SLC) had a fun chat with her playing the name game, finding out what friends we had in common. Then she and her companion invited us to their lunch with the member family that cooks all their meals for them. The sister was really quite energetic, and told a lot of funny stories, including one about when she (being rather taller than the average Peruvian) ran into a doorway while in a hurry, and fell backward and blacked out. That's not the funny part, I'm not that cruel - but when she woke back up and having a bruise and a goose egg on her forehead, she and her companion put on a little more make-up to make it look like they had been in a fight, and went to their next meal with the member family, acting like they were mad at each other. Anyway, I thought it was clever and amusing, and a good way of making the best of what was probably quite a painful injury.

All in all, we had an enjoyable time in Juliaca, and on Monday morning we headed back to Arequipa, making the 8-hour trip on a bus, once again.