Young entrepreneurs

'Tis the season for Somos Emprendedores, Somos Perú (we are entrepreneurs, we are Peru), the comprehensive course on writing your own business plan that every volunteer in the Community Economic Development program offers in their sites at the end of their first year. This means that my Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for the next couple months are occupied by teaching my ten or so jóvenes ages 16-24 about every aspect of starting and running your own business.

As my academic studies have never gone remotely near the realm of an MBA, a lot of the concepts I'm teaching I first formally learned during Peace Corps training last summer - from qualities of an entrepreneur, to feasibility studies, market valoration, client profiling, mission and vision, cost analysis, point of equilibrium, budget projections, customer service, operations plans, and environmental impact - in Somos, we cover it all. But, seeing as we're operating in rural Peru with youth who are new to the idea of business, we teach each topic in the most basic and most understandable way possible.

Peace Corps has developed a whole textbook/manual and curriculum for the Somos course (this is where I go to figure out, for example, how in the world you go about calculating the value of a market). However, having the outline of a lesson plan is not the same as being ready to teach a class - I always end up tweaking the official lesson to suit my own style of teaching, and the manual does not come with any pre-prepared materials. Consequently, on any given Monday or Wednesday afternoon, my desk typically looks like this:

The above explosion is what class prep looks like - powerpoint is never invited to the party. I write definitions and draw diagrams on butcher paper, make ridiculously bad drawings to help illustrate points, and create the props needed for the student-centered dinámicas (activities) that are the best part of every class. Without fail, preparing for the class takes equally as long or longer as does teaching the class itself. It makes me wonder how full-time teachers ever have enough time in their days!

I'm currently about a third of the way through the course, and it's been a lot of fun so far - the kids who come to class are really excited about starting their own businesses and it's clear they are getting a lot out of the course. Once we finish the class, the students will present their completed business plans, and I'll pick the best one to bring to Lima for the national SESP competition held at the U.S. Embassy. Each volunteer brings their best students, they all present their ideas to a panel of judges, and five or six will walk away with the seed money they need to actually start their businesses. The free trip to Lima and getting to visit the Embassy function as pretty cool consolation prizes :)

Hobbies

The Peace Corps lifestyle leaves ample time for hobbies: I think it's the combination of the volunteer's non-traditional work schedule with the exciting social scene of a rural Peruvian town where you are (almost) the only gringa. If you don't have a hobby, you might die of boredom before month two in site.

My Peace Corps hobbies include learning guitar, crocheting a variety of barely-useful items, running enough to contemplate training for a half marathon but never actually doing it, keeping this blog, hiking, and reading. Having the time to read for fun was something I actively looked forward to about Peace Corps, and the experience has not let me down. I read so much here, that I've realized I have a slight chance of being able to finish 100 books by the time I leave Peru. To make things more interesting, I've decided to make it a bit of a challenge/goal - check out the blog's new book nook if you want to track my progress. We'll see how close I get :)

Spanglish

Clever t-shirt (translation: that moment when you start to think in two languages at the same time)

I have serious struggles when I have to speak in 100% English. Luckily, almost anytime I'm speaking English in Peru, I'm talking to other volunteers. This means Spanglish is a totally normal means of communication, and it makes life so much easier! Whichever language's version of the word pops into your head first, that's the one you say - no filter necessary. When I'm talking to friends or family back home, it's not so easy; there's always a good number of two-second-extra long pauses while I try to figure out what word I'm looking for in English. Particularly when talking about work, there are Peace Corps-related words that I use in Spanish all the time, but that I never used in my day-to-day English life so I have to rummage deep in the back of my native vocabulary to find them.

Two Peru's

When you look at Peru compared to other Peace Corps countries, for example those in sub-Saharan Africa, my South American home definitely looks like the "posh corps." I mean, there are more than 30 Starbucks in this country - almost all are in Lima, but still, you can't exactly call Peru third-world. In fact, the World Bank has recently classified Peru as an "upper-middle-income economy." So what is Peace Corps doing here? We're here because, in reality, there are two Peru's: Lima, and non-Lima. And life doesn't look so rosy for the majority of Peruvians if you split the overall statistics down this key division and take a closer look. I came across this recent op-ed today, which does a nice job of summarizing why putting Peru in the "developed" category of countries would be a horrible mistake. Here's an excerpt:

"Peru is booming. Largely spared by the global financial crisis, its economy grew by 9.8% in 2008, 6.3% last year. Peru is an enviable fount of gold, silver, copper, fish, agriculture. Its capital is alive with foreign investment. Its cuisine is among the most celebrated in the world. Visit Lima, and you see a city abuzz with shops, restaurants, and a robust new middle class. Visit Cuzco or Machu Picchu, and you cannot help but note the five-star destinations.

"But look around more, and you see two Peru's: effervescent Lima, 9 and a half million strong, and the 20 million more who live outside it. While the poverty rate in Lima fell to 15.7% in 2011 from 44.8% in 2004, the rural Andes and Amazon languish in nearly feudal conditions. According to the World Bank, a citizen of Lima earns 21 times more than a resident of the outback, where the rural poverty rate is a staggering 54%. To make matters worse, it is a starkly racial problem: the poor are the dark-skinned indigenous, the rich, getting richer, are mostly white."

English teaching dilemmas

Being the only three native English speakers in the Cajabamba area, and given that every Peruvian schoolchild is required to learn the language, Jess, Katy and I are constantly receiving requests to teach English. Sometimes it's adults who want us to offer an English class so they can practice. Sometimes it's parents wanting to give their child the extra advantage of some one-on-one tutoring sessions with the gringa - when we say no, they even offer to pay us, and after twenty minutes of explaining the concept of "volunteer," they go off still a little disappointed that we don't want to spend our afternoons teaching their seven year-old. And other times it's the local teachers or principals who trap you in their office and literally continue talking/pleading/convincing you to teach their English classes for them until you say some form of yes that is satisfying enough to them while still leaving you with a way to get out of it later - those times are the worst.

While teaching English is something I enjoy, in the right context, it's not one of Peace Corps' main goals. Nor, in my view, is it the most sustainable use of my time here. For these reasons, I have yet to teach English in any structured way in Cajabamba - this also gives me the advantage that I can continue to use the white lie "my program doesn't allow me to teach English" to help me deflect incoming requests to teach. However, the exception to this rule is working with the local English teachers.

This past Friday and Saturday, we three volunteers offered a two-day workshop open to all the teachers in charge of English at Cajabamba's elementary and high schools. If we help improve these educators' abilities to effectively teach English, we are impacting more students than we possibly could just by offering English classes ourselves - the sustainability factor goes up by about 100%.

The whole group with their certificates at the end of the workshop

It is an unfortunate fact that while English is a government-mandated part of the school curriculum, the teachers assigned to teach the subject are often woefully underprepared to do so. Among the twenty or so teachers that came to our workshop, I'd say that about three are really qualified to be teaching English. The most glaring deficiency is pronunciation: in rural Peruvian schools, the vicious cycle is that teachers with poor English abilities represent the students' only access point to the language, so all the mispronunciations in the teacher's repertoire are going to be passed on to the next generation.

But this problem is structural, and does not reflect a lack of goodwill or effort on the part of the teachers (at least, not usually). The group at our workshop were extremely excited to have face time with three real-live English speakers for two days. While they listened attentively to our suggestions for how to make classes more dynamic and guidelines on teaching methods (the stated main purpose of the workshop), they were equally interested to just sit and practice pronouncing basic vocabulary in a repeat-after-me call and response fashion.

Practicing the classic food vocab activity: pretending to order off a restaurant menu

The workshop left me with mixed feelings. On one side, I am now more aware of the reality of the low level of English instruction in Peruvian schools, and is a bit disheartening to realize the true extent of the problem. But on the other hand, the teachers are excited to have the opportunity to improve their English skills, which in turn will give the students a better learning experience. Their eager participation in the workshop and their interest in continuing to work with us over the course of the school year gives me hope that, step by step, the system can improve.

Food for thought

Reading Mark Bittman's most recent op-ed on the prevalence of processed food in the typical American grocery store and, consequently, diet, I was struck by what now seems like a very obvious fact about my life in Cajabamba: I eat almost zero processed food. Judging by the fact that I failed to consciously realize this until now, it's clear that I do this without much active effort on my part.

Once I started thinking about it, it wasn't hard to explain. Instead of shopping at a U.S. grocery store, I buy almost all my food at an open-air market where local producers bring their fruit/veggies/legumes/meat to sell every day.

The peas I eat are sold fresh, not in frozen plastic bags. The meat I buy is never packaged or processed in any way; it's simply butchered and placed for sale on the meat counter's slab of stone. I don't have to open a can in order to cook beans; here they come out of big brown sacks and I usually have to pick out some pebbles and wood chips before I throw them in the pot. Our honey doesn't have any additives, my host dad takes it out of the hives and brings it home in a plastic tupperware. The flour we use at my house is made from wheat brought in from the farm and ground at the mill a few blocks away. All the bread is fresh-baked, and the milk goes straight from the udder into the bucket that the milk lady then brings by our house - both of these are thus bought on a daily basis. Of course I'll buy the occasional bag of pasta or bar of corporate chocolate, but in truth Cajabamba's norm is just local, fresh food. Now that I think about it, that's pretty cool.

Bank bonanza

In the past week, I have facilitated the first savings rounds of three community banks, hooray! Seeing as it's been almost eight months since I started talking about community banks with potential counterparts in my site, I'm extremely excited that all the talking is finally coming to fruition.

A community bank is a group of people (most often women) who decide to save money together, and from the accumulated savings, give/take out small loans among themselves. Although it's quite a simple concept, it's a very powerful financial tool that is awesome because it a) gets people in the habit of saving (not common in Peru), and b) gives women access to small amounts of capital without the need of any formal guarantees. Confianza (trusted relationships) is the key to a successful community bank: if you know all the other ladies you're saving with, you know which door to knock on if a loan isn't returned on time.

So I've now got a group of 11 year-old boys saving S/. 1 each week in their homeroom class, a group of campo ladies who are community leaders with the local center against domestic violence saving S/. 10 each month, and a group of women who're part of a community service organization saving S/. 50 each month. These are tiny amounts by U.S. standards (S/. 50 is less than $20, and one sole equals about 39 cents), but for these ladies (and boys) it is a big deal to save this much on a regular basis, and it's fun to see how excited they get talking to each other about it.

While I am the one teaching these groups how the community banks work, each bank elects its own Administrative Committee, and the four members of the committee are the ones who manage the bank's operations. The President runs the meetings, the Secretary keeps the books, the Treasurer counts the money, and the Auditor makes sure nothing shady goes on under the table. At the end of each bank meeting, the cashbox stays in the Treasurer's house, and each of the other three committee members takes home a key to one of the three padlocks we put on the cashbox. Although partially symbolic, this reinforces the idea that the money belongs to all the members of the bank and can only be managed when everyone is present.

Unfortunately, since the first meetings are a little chaotic while everyone gets used to the process and gets organized, I forgot to take pictures of any of my banks. I'll try to work on that...

Snapshots from the jungle, part 4: Unusual foods

This final installation in the series of jungle-related blog posts will center on that central aspect of any travel adventure: new and delicious foods. I'll start with the foods I did not eat, but only witnessed the weirdness of...

Armadillo meat on sale at Belén market

Turtle meat, also on sale all over Belén

Mmmm, maggots - these live ones were crawling around in a bowl waiting to be skewered into grilled kebabs

One of my braver companions sampling the maggots

Now, onto foods I actually ate.

Bananas were everywhere - mini-bananas, bananas that taste like apples, orange bananas, green-peeled bananas, non-sweet bananas that are served as a substitute for potatoes, fried bananas, banana chips, the list goes on. All of them were delicious, as was pretty much every other jungle fruit we sampled. My favorite was zapote, a small, round green fruit with a hard outer rind, whose orange inner fruit was a blend of the taste and texture of a cantaloupe, a mango, and a pumpkin.

In addition to bananas, coconuts were to be found on every corner. Street carts and roadside shacks were always ready to machete-chop a green, yellow, or brown variety open for you to stick a straw in and have some refreshing coconut water.

Sugar-cane juice is the other popular Iquitos choice of drink. When visiting a village outside the city, we got to experience the traditional way of making the juice, and it was amazing how much liquid can be crushed out of a single stalk of cane. Unsurprisingly, considering that it's basically an earthy-tasting sugar water, the juice was delicious.

When we spent a morning fishing for piranhas, Kelsey caught a catfish big enough for us to share during lunch, which was also quite tasty.

The baby catfish I caught was obviously too small for lunch - we used him as piranha bait instead

Although not caught by our own efforts, I did later get the chance to eat some grilled piranha, served whole with teeth and all. It was accompanied by the traditional jungle tacacho: smashed bananas that have been rolled into a ball and lightly fried.

The final installation in the Iquitos food saga is by no means a jungle specialty, but it was literally the best omelette I have eaten in my life, so it merits a spot on the blog all the same. On the last day of our trip, we decided to have brunch at a French bistro (à la Georgetown's Café Bonaparte) we'd seen along the water. The result was this beautiful mushroom-cheese omelette with a real-deal French baguette on the side. We of course spent the plane ride home kicking ourselves for not having discovered this miracle restaurant earlier in the week - oh well, guess I'll just have to go back! :)

Snapshots from the jungle, part 3: Animal friends

Going to the jungle means you get to see and interact with cool jungle animals, as evidenced by the following photos. As our group was particularly enamored of the monkeys, let's start with those:

They're not shy about clambering all over you, particularly if you're offering fruit treats

Nick even got a friend to ride around on his head during our canoe trip

Super-friendly bald uakari monkeys

The one named Lisa (la mona Lisa, get it?) especially loved to play

Baby wooly monkey

Saki monkey - so fluffy

Spider monkey

Ocelot: relatively small-sized but very large-eyed cat

We also saw a jaguar, but the photo about its food is better than the photo of the actual cat

Capybara: super-sized relative of a guinea pig

Coati - reminded me of the tricksy ones that try to steal your lunch at Iguazú

Giant anteater!

Lots of beautiful butterflies - the reserve we visited had 17 varieties

Macaw parrot

Adorable baby manatees at a wildlife preservation NGO - their bristly whiskers tickled when we fed them plant leaves 

This tree was full of hanging birds' nests

So many termites - the indigenous people use them as natural bug repellent

We saw lots of turtles hanging around, including this prehistoric-looking giant

Toucan! When they're not flying, they take giant two-foot hops instead of walking

Sloth! Who has a much better name in Spanish: oso perezoso (lazy bear)

Nocturnal frogs we found on our night expedition

Piranha, fresh-caught from the Amazon

Don't worry, Amanda survived the anaconda attack :)

Snapshots from the jungle, part 2: Life in the selva

When we stepped off the river boat, we had arrived in Iquitos, the heart of the Peruvian jungle. The city is surrounded by various rivers on all sides, so the heart of city (and tourist) life is the tree-lined waterfront promenade. Every night the walkway would fill with folks out for a stroll, the bars would fill with people-watchers, and the local capoeira (Brazilian dance/karate) club would come out to practice on the pier. The promenade also hosts a number of colonial-era tiled casonas, the mansion-like houses that were once home to the traders who made it rich off Iquitos' early rubber business.

But not everyone can live in a casona... thousands of Iquitos' inhabitants reside in Belén, a shantytown that is literally floating for ten months out of the year.

These houses are at the mercy of the Amazon's water levels. In June and July, the above waterway would be a normal city street, complete with pedestrians and buses, but the river reigns the rest of the year. Puttering in between the maze of houses in our motorized canoe, I kept pondering the endless list of potential complications of living in a house surrounded by (or, not uncommonly, inundated with) water. Although some of the houses are truly floating, the majority merely stand on very tall stilts. Last year the Amazon set records for flood levels, and the watermarks on the Belén houses made plain that many would've had 3+ feet of water in them. But that's life, and the residents simply live with land-housed relatives for a few months, or hike up their hammocks a couple extra feet until the water recedes.

The most common form of transport in Belén, and in Iquitos in general, are long wooden canoes with an outboard motor nailed onto the stern. Sometimes the boat driver has to pause the journey momentarily in order to re-nail the motor into place - normal. It is also totally normal for these passenger boats to pass under "bridges" (glorified wooden planks haphazardly nailed as footpaths across smaller canals) so low that all boat riders have to lay flat in the bottom of the boat to avoid decapitation. My sun-umbrella-holding friend in the photo below kindly showed me how it was done in enough time to avoid that sad fate - no thanks to the boat captain, who simply barreled forward at full speed.

When on land, Iquitos-ians use only open-air transportation: the breeze is the only saving grace in the otherwise constantly humid jungle heat. Consequently, none of the mototaxis have doors, and the buses are like trolleys: no windows or doors!

The other way to stay cool in the selva? Swimming of course! While the water is decidedly brown, a few parasites might even be worth it for a respite from the ubiquitous sweatiness. When we came across these niños having a ball in the river on our way back from the butterfly reserve, Kelsey couldn't resist joining in:

Our group spent a different day relaxing at a bathwater-warm jungle laguna, and another afternoon we cooled off at a tropical resort-esque swimming pool near the city. The pool was hidden in the midst of a lush green garden, complete with a five-story treehouse that seriously belonged in "Swiss Family Robinson." We contemplated giving up our hostel beds and permanently relocating to this arboreal dream-home, but the owners informed us that sleeping in the treehouse was 100% prohibido.

Crushed, we settled for a one-night sojourn to a jungle lodge a two-hour boatride from Iquitos. The coolest part about those accommodations was when it poured rain at night, and we got to fall asleep to the beautiful sound of water falling on the thatch-leaf roof. Surprisingly, no leaks!

Part of our jungle lodge tour was a visit to a community of indigenous Yaguas people. Once you get over the extreme cheesiness/awkwardness of the whole tourist-visiting-"natives" concept, there's still some interesting cultural knowledge to be gained from the experience. For example, upon arrival at the village we were offered a traditional drink. I was semi-listening to the guide's explanation while I took in my surroundings, and of course happily tried what I understood to be a liquid made from yuca. It was strangely sour and unlike anything I'd had before, but hey, try everything once right? Clearly I should've paid closer attention, since Amanda later informed me that was the famous traditional Peruvian drink made by old ladies who sit around and chew the yuca, re-spit it out into a bowl, and let it ferment until it's somehow acceptable to drink. Awesome. But, we did get to shoot extremely cool blow-dart guns, so I guess I came out even.

Face paint to welcome us into the tribe

Professional dart-gun warrior, obvio

And, one final random snapshot of jungle life: the makings of some woven reed baskets, laying in the sun to dry.