Week One

The project has only been open for five days, but we already have 25 people here! We're clearing rubble and doing demolition work, but a couple new projects are already underway. On Friday, we'll do a beach cleanup in a neighboring community, on Saturday we'll do games and activities for children living in the shelters and tent camps, and next Monday, we'll start digging holes for the columns of a school rebuilding project.

It's still really dusty. Especially when we're working. After work, we laid down on the slab we cleared and made dust angels.

My Spanish still sucks. The grammar book that I bought has laid untouched for almost the entire time I've been in Peru. Between getting the operation up, keeping it running, and scoping out new projects, there isn't time to practice my verb conjugation and learn vocab. I can say hammer, shovel, nail, wall, cement, demolish, etc. It seems to get the job done.

Amy, a Peace Corps volunteer who has been living here for almost two years, has helped me a lot with the school and beach cleanup projects. We're also working on a boatbuilding project, to help the fishermen who lost their homes and their boats in the quake. (There was a minor tsunami surge following the quake, which smashed up boats and washed some of them out to sea.) Yesterday I visited a boatyard and met a boatbuilder, which was a tremendously cool experience, but an intimidating one as well. The boats are big, heavy, expensive ordeals which take a long time to build. I hope that we can still help some of the fishermen.

Like I said before, there are 25 people living in the house now. We have two bathrooms and no showers. How does it work? I don't know, but people still seem to like it here! We do hot bucket showers at night and then everyone sits around our fire (a couple volunteers found a broken off cement pipe, which works well as a fire pit). The volunteers are from the US, England, Ireland, Holland, and Australia.

This community is starting to feel like home, and the people are warming up to us. They greet us as we pass, are beginning to learn our names, and shower us with snacks (and meals) while we're working. Some kids have come out to help work. It's tiring but extremely fun and satisfying work. Check the photos and monitor our progress at www.hodr.org!

The road to Pisco

I might have said it before, but I should clarify: Pisco is a province and a city. If you think that's confusing, Ica is a region, a province, and a city. I know, these people need more names.

We left San Clemente after paying our house mom for letting us stay with her, and took a taxi to Pisco (city). The place looks like a war zone. Adobe, brick, cement - structures of all construction techniques have collapsed. Armed soldiers patrol the area around the central Plaza de Armas, and twisted, crunched, and crumbled buildings are on every block. We passed by the church where 120 people died while attending a mass, when the roof came crashing down on them. It's completely cleared away; only two towers remain. Dust clogs the gutters, often in piles higher than the level of the sidewalk. Each footstep results in a soft poof of dust rising around your feet.

Our hotel is the Hostal San Isidro, the only place in the Lonely Planet Peru 2007 guidebook listings that answered my call and had rooms available. Chilling to thing that the others simply don't exist anymore. It's surprisingly nice and even has electricity, although at first there was no hot water. The staff furnished the rooms with a large, 150L bucket of water from which I could take scoop showers. I suspected the water was coming from the pool, which was starting to get murky with dust. This was confirmed when I started to smell like chlorine after bathing. (Luckily, hot water - and even wireless internet! - were restored after three days. The hostel has set up their own system; these services remain out for most of the rest of the city.)

Jodi, Marc, and I walked around Pisco and ended up meeting Pilar and Joan, the owners of another hotel in town. They invited us in, served us coffee, cookies, and then even bust out the Pisco! Hotel owners are a great resource, because they deal with many of the same things that we will, in order to set up our volunteer base. They understand the local community, usually have contacts in the local government, know what's a fair wage for people to help cook and clean, source hardware materials and other supplies, etc. Pilar and Joan were incredibly generous with their time, and extended amazing hospitality during our afternoon chat. They're also fun, charming, nice people. Good to know that if you come to Pisco anytime soon, the two hotels left standing (ok, there's probably a few more) are both great options!

One thing that will be a unique challenge to setting up a project here: running a volunteer base and a variety of projects requires a lot of materials and services. We rely on local businesses to help us in all of these areas. As the dust settles, we'll see what's left and who's reopening.

San Clemente

After the truck adventure, we spent the morning exploring a neighborhood in San Clemente. This is a poorer, rural area, so much of the home construction is done with adobe. The thick, heavy walls have little defense against earthquakes, so they crumble and collapse quite severely. Roofs and walls simply drop into the rooms below.

Community kitchens ("ollacomun," literally, "communal pot") have been established in most neighborhoods. These help to divide up the work of cooking and ensure that children are fed during this emergency phase. Not being able to speak Spanish is a major obstacle; Jodi speaks a little and helped us translate in the morning, but in order to do a thorough assessment, we'll need to find a dedicated translator. We spoke with several families and were invited into their homes, both permanent homes as well as temporary shelters. The poverty level here is widespread and somewhat desensitizing - several families have moved into makeshift shacks made out of thin reed mats or randomly assembled sheets of plastic, but it's evident that some people simply lived like this before the earthquake as well; the mats are weathered and old.

People are still friendly and generous, sharing what little they have. Several times, we were invited in and fed, whether it was a few soda crackers, a tamale with chicken, or a beverage. A distribution meeting was held while we visited at one house; a stack of new USAID blankets had been delivered. One of the local leaders called Marc, Jodi, and myself up, one by one, to hand out blankets. I felt sheepish and embarassed, I didn't bring these blankets and I didn't want any credit for handing anything out. But then after we each handed our blankets to women called forward by the local leader, a group of local women came forward to hand out the next round of blankets. Perhaps it's a custom, that everything comes from someone. At any rate, it was nice.

Will we work in San Clemente? I don't know. On to Pisco...

Riding in trucks

The project is a go! How did we get it get it to this point? A whole lot of random craziness.

Last Saturday, we decided to begin our trip into the affected areas by riding with a truck of relief goods being delivered by a man running a local NGO. After waiting six hours at the National Stadium in Lima, we finally secured a truck and a random assortment of goods to take to the rural towns of Cañete (a province about 1.5 hours north of Pisco). Our random group grew to include Aníbal Paredes (founder of YCPA), Marc and myself, Paige (an American who individually raised money from friends to purchase 9 full rolls of plastic sheeting material) and her Peruvian friend Fito, Jodi (a photographer working for the Boston Globe), a Peruvian police officer, Pastor David Jesson and his team of missionaries from DreamCenter Peru, and our truck driver. Some of us rode in the DreamCenter pickup truck, and the rest of us piled on top of the sacks of relief in an enclosed cargo truck. I was in the cargo truck.

The truck wasn't as claustrophobic as I thought it would be. The roof was opaque yet translucent, and we arranged makeshift couches out of the sacks of clothes and mattresses included in our delivery. It's a strange sensation to travel and have no visual cues for where you actually are; our only window to the outside was a 1cm diameter hole punched into the back sliding door of the truck (yes, I did start calling it a window). Two and a half hours into our ride we'd all fallen asleep, when I awoke to an odd silence - we'd pulled over to the shoulder of the highway with an overheated engine. Oh, maybe the dashboard instruments weren't working, or maybe this truck doesn't even have any, I thought. No, the truck did indeed have instruments, and they did indeed work, the driver just ignored them and drove with a burning smell for an hour. Voilà, hole in the radiator.

We sat at the rest stop for two hours and idly ate pan con huevo (simply a roll with a fried egg, yet so satisfying) and drank coffee (watery hot chocolate for me). I climbed into the back of the truck to check on my bag (and because the inside of the truck, even with the door open, was warmer than the night). A truck agreed to give us a push to try and get us started; not thinking, I decided to just sit it out in the truck. As the pusher truck started backing up to the open back of my truck, I grew a little concerned, as it made contact and gave us a light boost, I realized how strange this whole thing was, and as we began to roll, I began to imagine us careening with no brakes, ending up in a ditch with a wheel spinning in the air. Really, all that happened was that we started to roll, the truck started, and we limped into Cañete to deliver our goods.

As the truck fell silent again, I could hear the buzz of a crowd outside. Peeping out of the hole, I saw that we were parked in the central plaza of the first town on our list,with a plaza full of people waiting for supplies and relief. Due to the delays throughout the day, it was too late to continue on and distribute goods to all the towns on our list. Instead, we decided to unload the goods and then continue on a bit farther towards Pisco. With Pastor David's help, we found our way to San Clemente (a district in Pisco province), where we could spend the night. A local family with an undamaged house put us up for the night, and we quickly laid out our sleeping bags and fell asleep.