This week, I was asked by the
Fulbright commission to define my supplementary project in 100-200 words. As a
Fulbright grantee, I am required to dedicate 20 hours a week to a project of my
choice in addition to the hours I put in to fulfill the grant that I received (in
my case teaching English at UNPRG. The
project is about as open as possible. It
can be anything from doing research towards a master’s thesis or collecting
folktales from local populations to compile a book or coaching kids’
sports. In February when I met the
commission in Lima along with the other 3 grantees to Peru, we were told our
project could be anything we wanted to dedicate our time to, as long as we
could have a sense of accomplishment and success. They simply want us to be “successful.”
I gave it some thought and ended up
deciding to partner with a local NGO. “How
do I explain my project so succinctly?”
I asked myself. “Do I even have a
‘project’?” With the reassurance of the
dictionary’s definition of a project, I began to write. Titling my project Bonds of Solidarity, I ended with:
With the aim to learn more about life in
rural Peru, to serve and connect with others and to gain a better understanding
of how non-governmental organizations function, I decided to partner with Centro de Investigación y Promoción del
Desarrollo Sostenible (CIPDES) an NGO based out of Chiclayo.
With this organization, I travel to rural
areas of the department at least two days a week to help with projects such as
installing drip irrigation systems to increase crop yields for local farmers
and to bring water to homes that previously had no running water and
identifying families with children in need of improved homes or kitchens to
improve their health and quality of life.
For such families it may mean working with several institutions to help
get them water, a toilet or a stove to contain their firewood so that they do
not have to breathe in smoke all day as food is cooking. I began a small project of offering help with
homework for children in the village of Eten a few hours a week.
Partnering with
CIPDES is proving to be rewarding and challenging, helping me to grow both
personally and professionally.
Several of these
parts of my project have already been mentioned in previous posts, but new
developments are always unfolding.
Last weekend I
had the opportunity to help with and support two different health
workshops. On Friday, CIPDES held a
seminar for people from many of Peru’s departments to explain the positive
experiences that they have had with two mobile clinics in this province. CIPDES will be turning over their two
semi-truck polyclinics to the government soon since the government is better
equipped to finance the project. The
mobile clinics are taken to underdeveloped rural areas in which no medical
services are available and numerous specialists travel voluntarily to spend up
to 10 days in a location treating the local population, be it dental care,
delivering babies, performing surgeries or simply doing routine
examinations. The following day, I collaborated with 8
nursing students from a private university in Chiclayo to explain common health
related issues in homes to women and elderly individuals in Ciudad Eten and to
identify problems that they have in their homes. Able to relate to several of their situations
after my time in Kenya, I feel compelled to continue with the project and hope
that we are able to improve the quality of life for some of these women and
their children. Most of them are cooking
with firewood on the ground, meaning that it is not good for their backs, that
they are breathing in smoke all day (and so are their children) and their eyes
are also being damaged by the smoke.
Additionally, several of them do not have water in their homes (and
therefore only pit latrines). One of the
mothers doesn’t even have a latrine in her home! This week, I also got to visit the rural
community of Valle Hermoso, to see the small cabinet that holds all the medical
treatment available to the local residents and learned about the anthrax
problems that struck the community a few months back as the virus is always
living in the soil and can infect livestock (and subsequently people) under
certain conditions.
Additionally, CIPDES
provides support to several rural schools, as it sees education as an integral
part of helping people to move out of poverty, improving their quality of life. On Thursday afternoons, I help children with
homework or teach small English lessons to children in Eten. This week on Friday, I got the chance to
accompany one of CIPDES’s employees to distribute toys and educational
materials that the NGO had purchased for some of the schools that they
support. Seeing the children and teacher’s
excitement and curiosity was rewarding and reminded me of how blessed I am.
CIPDES also works
in the environmental sector supporting conservation projects. Last weekend, I had the opportunity to go to
Media Luna, a beach reached only by climbing a large rocky hill and descending
the other side. The cliffs near Media
Luna are one of the world’s largest resting places for pelicans as well as home
to blue-footed birds and the Humbolt penguin which is nearly extinct.
We got to take a tour of the conservation
site, learned about how they are running their programs and also learned about
the injustice of rock collecting. There
are so many things that we do not think about and take for granted. When we see rocks on a playground in the USA,
I doubt many of us stop to wonder where they came from and the work that it
took to get them there. As it turns out,
there are several people working near this beach, barely making enough money to
put food into their stomachs.
Unfortunately these men are being exploited by some American companies,
being forced to run heavy bags of rocks up the steep sandy slopes of the coast
to a place where a truck can access them to be transported to the USA as cheap
materials. It makes me so sad to see
people being exploited in such a manner, especially when they are doing work
much harder than most people I’ve met!
Today, I went to Tierra Blanca
(near Chongoyape) where a peace corps volunteer from Maryland is working to
build Peru’s first “eco-library.” This
building will have a neat design, if the funds are found to finish the
project. All is ready except for having
the necessary cement. Instead of using
bricks of adobe to fill the insides of the walls, plastic bottles stuffed with
other non-degradable plastic trash will be used. The community members have collected and
stuffed over 7000 bottles.
After helping
a bit lugging rocks for the base this morning, I went with a few other
individuals to Chaparrí, a conservation reserve and home to the “spectacled
bear.” We did see one.
I also met the director of the reserve who turns
out to be Heinz Plenge, a world-renowned photographer for Discovery Channel and
National Geographic! (If you want to
check out some of his amazing photography see
http://www.plenge.com).
The dry forest is home to many types of unique birds that are found nowhere
else in the world.
Many
times I feel as though I am not serving others nearly as much as they are
serving me. I am constantly learning
about the fascinating world around us. By
working together, by sharing information, joys and struggles, by trying to lift
one another up, we can all be part of a better world through bonds of
solidarity.
