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.