Site Visit and New Projects

January 16th to 30th, 2007 La Encantada, Peru

Animal Husbandry and Family Gardens

The past couple of weeks I have been talking to families in the area about starting both an animal husbandry project along with a family garden. I am pretty excited about this project, mostly because the families I am working with are very enthusiastic and the projects complement each other so well.

Basically we are going to raise small batches of animals to sell in the community, eat in the homes and sell in the larger city markets. We are going to start with turkeys and ducks. Next week I have a meeting with the regional director of Peace Corps from Piura to discuss the possibility of attaining a loan to pay for the initial capital required. What´s great is that we can mix the animal excrement in with our compost piles for the family gardens. The nutrition level isn´t very good here and hopefully family gardens will at least induce some families to start eating vegetables.

January 15th, 2007

Site Visit

The APCD (Associate Program Country Director), Alfredo, for the business program made a site visit today. The first half hour or so we just chilled out in my house and chatted with my host family. Then Wilfredo, the regional director for Piura, checked out my room to make sure it complied with Peace Corps regulations. My doctor, Sunni, loaded me up with any medicines I made need.

We then met with some of the leaders in my town to discuss Peace Corps and the role of a volunteer in the community. This meeting went quite well. After checking on the progress of some of my projects, we headed to Chulucanas to meet with my counterpart. We then ate a decent lunch in town before they all departed to the next site to visit in the sierra. It was a good site visit and felt good to get the first one over with.