On my first two days of work, I made utility hole covers out of scrap wood from palettes, to replace covers that had been stolen for their metal content. The part where I wandered around town looking for holes was right up my alley (no smart-arse remarks, please!), since I've done that many times as part of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's Good Roads Ride.

Right after fitting the first cover, a woman obliviously stepped on it, proving its value. I also got a few thank-yous from locals as I went about my business—a shopkeeper even gave us free cola as a gesture of appreciation for us covering the hole in front of her shop. I wasn't expecting to be thanked; it's nice that I was, anyhow.

On Wednesday I tagged along with Jimmy, the group's Director, to help with proposed project assessment. PSF gets hundreds of applications for help, and this fact-finding mission helps decide which fraction of those applications actually result in people getting assistance. Because of my poor Spanish, I don't feel I was much help at all, beyond taking a few measurements. But it did give me some insight into the process, and more importantly to me, insight into how people in Pisco live. I ended up seeing three quite different living situations that day.

The first was a dwelling near the beach, shared by a family of eight and a family of four. Before the earthquake and tsunami, they shared a seven-room house, but the place they were in now, on the same property, had just three. The front room was the building built through a government emergency program; it was basically a slab of concrete poured over their old foundation, with a one-room steel framed cottage built on top. It functioned as the bedroom for the family of four. The middle room was on a concrete slab that was part of the original building, with walls made of a chunky orange tarp and a ceiling made of bamboo, estera (a thin bamboo lattice) and some corrugated plastic. The three-generation family of eight slept in that room, across three beds. The back room was the kitchen which had one of the original walls and more tarps and timber, and was decorated with paintings of beautiful houses beneath Spanish mountains. I'd actually love to have a room like that in an area with this kind of climate, but not if it was the only indoor common area.

Unlike many houses, they also had a functioning bathroom. This counted against them, since PSF's top priorities are sanitation and security, and actually having a toilet scores big points in that first category. But since their household includes small children and elderly people, they were still assigned a medium priority. And all they really want is for that middle room to be more solid, since it gets cold at night. We can use the tarp and the bamboo holding it up to give the ceiling a few more layers, and build them walls out of bricks. They were in a decent neighbourhood, and to prevent us always from working the same parts of town, we scale their standard of living according to their local community, so this counted in their favour as well.

The second place I went was not in a decent neighbourhood. Streets were unpaved, there was a lot of rubbish (there is all over town, actually), and it smelled bad. I braced myself for the inside of the house, but insufficiently. The front room was okay—concrete floor and ceiling, brick walls—but it smelled really, really bad. I thought this might be the reason that the room was basically empty, but Peru has a very strong tradition of the bedrooms being in the back of the house, and the household didn't own any furniture, except for a bed. That was at the back of the house, where the smell was coming from. 'The back of the house' was basically a few posts with hessian strung up to it, and a partial ceiling of estera. A few fowl roamed around, as did a couple of small children, stepping over a very skinny, sleeping dog. Every post had a pigeon or chook sitting atop, and their 'bathroom' was a bucket. I've been to a few impoverished nations, and a few additional slums, but without a doubt, and with due respect to the people that lived there, it was absolutely the most disgusting dwelling I've seen in the world, ever. But Jimmy assured me he's seen much worse.

The third place was at the southern edge of town, past the tip. Theirs was the only brick house within blocks; the rest were made of timber and leaning bamboo posts. They had a new television, a stereo, and a fairly solid roof over their entire house. Some of the interior walls were made of that estera stuff, and they wanted help making those of brick as well—apparently all the men in the household had been injured in some way. Their home would violate many building codes in every other country I've lived in, but for Pisco, they lived in luxury—they even had a land line. We'll be calling next week, to tell them 'no'.

I was supposed to help out with some other project in the afternoon, but there was some missed connection, so instead, I read up on Peruvian electrical codes. I found out that for the most part, there aren't any. Power points here will accept any European round-pinned or North American/Japanese flat pinned plugs, even though the former normally carry around 220V at 50Hz, and the latter about 110V at 60Hz. Peru's standard is really weird: 120V at 50Hz! In any case, each power point only has two holes: nothing has an earth connection ('grounding connection' in the U.S). I think this is why people sometimes get shocked by the water heaters we have in the showers, which do have an earth wire; it's just not connected to anything. However, our biodiesel generator apparently has a good solid earth connection, presumably something like the 3m rods that are standard in other parts of the world.

I plan to write up a proposal and cost estimate for connecting those heaters to that. Just expressing interest in this was enough for somebody to hand me the job of installing some emergency lighting, and everyone comes to me to ask electrical questions now. It's great that I can answer them—my half-degree in electrical engineering is a valued resource here! And that's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to get out of doing this—feeling my skills are valued.

The sun is always shining in Pisco, but the streets and beaches are littered with rubbish and there’s a fecal content to the water. The building codes and living standards are sub-par, at best, compared to developed-world standards, but hey, it never rains. 

The desolate conditions are exactly why Burners Without Borders went there in the first place, and the reason Pisco Sin Fronteras remains today. The hundreds of volunteers that cycle through Pisco each month subject themselves to foodborne illness, demanding work schedules in harsh conditions and bunk-style, commodity-stripped accommodations, and they love every minute of it. 

If you’ve been to Burning Man, you know there’s something very rewarding about putting yourself out there in the harsh conditions, weathering the sun and storms and making it out alive. At PSF, though, you truly have a greater purpose to carry out your innermost desires for surviving apocalyptic conditions that many people in the area have endured on a permanent basis since the 2024 earthquake. 

In the three weeks I spent at PSF, I gained a true appreciation for the comforts of home that I lacked there. While a sacrifice for me, Pisco volunteers actually live in the higher echelon of people in that area. While we complained about eating rice, potatoes and chicken for the third time that week, many people of the region didn’t eat three times that week. While we groaned about going to the toilet so often from the very same food, many of the people that PSF helps didn’t have a toilet at all. And while we moaned about a 44 hour work week in the heat, the people we helped were happy to work by our side, in addition to maintaining their normal jobs, just to have a stable roof above their heads. Indeed, my work there proved that none of us has right to complain about much of anything.
 
As an experienced Spanish speaker, my language skills were in high demand around the organization, so I was able to get a pretty thorough glimpse of the situation in Pisco. On my first day of community assessment, I had the privilege of speaking with a police officer in one of the most underprivileged areas of Pisco, a shantytown called El Molino. 

He provided critical insight to the problems in the area, unrivaled by any other interviewee I met, and what an introduction it was. He told us that the number-one issue in the area is domestic violence—men beating women and children, and children beating their parents. He said the law prevents police from stepping in to a violent situation unless someone is unconscious or severely bleeding. There is little recourse for the victims, as well, since the only service is miles away and there are no shelters in the region. 

The second issue, he said, was a lack of sanitization and basic services. There is no pluming or garbage service and the people just throw their waste in the street or on the beach.  Lastly, he told us, the children are out of control. With few programs, lack of parental control and lack of education, the kids of the village simply run rampant. They smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, form gangs and have children as early as age 12. 

The pang of this information made my heart sink into my shoes. “What can we do to help?” was my only reply. The most important solution, he said, is education—education of anyone, of any age, on any topic, really. Ignorance is the impetus of almost all of these hardships, and educating the people is the only solution. Of course, the government complicates matters by denying these people the basic services they need to survive happily, but simple, grassroots solutions exist to ameliorate some of the suffering. 

PSF recently constructed a school in the area and regularly works with community leaders and families to turn the situation around. This community faces challenges that seem nearly impossible to overcome, but that’s why we are there. My pain for them is comforted by the fact that so many people sign up every day to do whatever they can to support the betterment of this community.  Assistance of any and every kind is essential to lift these people out of this brutal situation. 

PSF is like a renegade family of drifters that has created an unstoppable machine of compassionate assistance. I feel blessed to have been a part of it, if only for a short time, and encourage anyone to join who needs a reminder of just how good we have it.  

Poured concrete today for a family's new bathroom.  We mixed it by hand, carried it in a wheelbarrow, and took turns shoveling the aggregate with Vladamir and Delia, the homeowners.  They were given permission to leave their jobs for the day to help out - Vladamir commented that his body wasn't used to the hard work because he works in a fish factory.  He worked his tail off, and so did his Mrs.

Tony spent the day building beds and doors.  I helped him out this morning with the beds (work is easy when you're sleeping with your boss) but left after lunch. At the risk of being too look-at-us-helping-poor-people-in-South-America, I'll tell you that we're buying one particular family new mattresses.  Currently all five of them share one dirty, floppy single mattress, and the least we can do is spend a few bucks on mattresses. They're cheap by our standards.  It was Tony's idea, and he's been planning it since the first week we got here.  He seems quite comfortable combining his carpentry skills with helping people.


The community development project I'm working on is shining light on the level of poverty that exists in South America.  I'm not new to the world of "have nots," though the lack of access to resources here in this town - and can I presume many other towns? - is such that the only food supplement program I've been able to find offers just two glasses of milk per month to kids who have a birth certificate.  Two glasses of milk a month.  You might burn more calories walking to get your glass of milk than you'll gain from drinking it.  This milk program is part of their equivalent to "social services" who's office does not have a phone, which highlights again the lack of access to resources.  If you're hungry here, unless I'm wrong, you're gonna be hungry for a while.

Moving on to the next subject: Domestic violence.  There is no shelter for victims of domestic violence in the entire province of Pisco.  There used to be one, but it was wrecked in the earthquake, and funds to build a new one have not come around since then.  At the moment, there's a great organization called Centro Emergencia Mujer which is a 9 to 5 operation that helps women who are being abused by their partners (why do I only mention the women, you ask? Because the men are just about always doing the beatings.  That's why).  If a situation is bad enough, the social worker at this Centro will bring the women to Lima to a shelter, but they need one here.  I'm meeting with the folks who run the Centro next Tuesday to see what they need for their center, who would run it, and how it was run before, because PSF could build that shelter.

Next topic: Lack of education.  School in Pisco is free, so long as you can afford supplies and uniforms, which are expensive relative to this local economy.  Social services helps with uniforms, so I asked them how to get one.  The family comes in to the office, fills out some paperwork, brings it to the mayors office, mayor's office verifies that they need help buying a uniform, they bring the form back to the office, maybe they get a uniform.  The workers here couldn't tell me how many uniforms they give out in one month, one week, or one year, because it's so few.  It's too complicated, they said, knowing that the run around was ridiculous.  And it's not their fault that they have limited resources to offer their community, they're just working with what they've been given.

So if you can afford to attend school, you'll generally finish around age 16.  At that point you can go to college, but most people can't afford it.  The idea of loans for college doesn't exist here.  To get a three year degree in nursing it costs about 400 US dollars, start to finish, including the certificate at the end.  400!  That's it!  That's what we spend in two months of dining out!  One month, sometimes.  But this is so much money to these people.  One family I met with only eats lunch because they can't afford anything else...they'll nearly never jump out of poverty if all they can ever afford is one meal per day.  Learning a skill or trade through education is so important, but if you can't access it then what to you do? The idea of paying for an education is impossible for them.

The problem isn't laziness.  Some people might be lazy, but poverty is so much more complex than simple laziness.  What I think would be fantastic to offer these people is some sort of scholarship program so they could learn a trade and earn an income.  I'm doing some research on how to run it, met with a few schools here, ask the families what they'd like to do.  Blah blah blah.  The cool thing about PSF is that they're interested in poverty relief as a compliment to disaster relief.  It's quite refreshing to offer professional skills in an environment where your ideas aren't hushed and quieted for lack of authority, but rather you're encouraged to make it happen.  There's hope, people.  Hope!