Trip to the Sierra

September 30th thru October 3rd, 2007 Pacaipampa, Peru

Chicken Charlas

One of favorite things about Peace Corps is when you get to collaborate on projects. Jimmy and Lenah are a married couple that live 8 hours from the regional capital of Piura in a small mining town called Pacaipampa. Jimmy is a health volunteer and Lenah is an environmental volunteer. Jimmy has been working with a group of 20 year old guys who have decided to build a giant chicken coop to raise chickens for sale for the nearby region. Hoping to prevent a future catastrophe, Jimmy invited Mike and I to Pacaipampa to teach a couple basic business classes to his chicken coop guys.

So Sunday morning, I hopped on the 7am bus to Pacaipampa for the ensuing 8 hour ride to Pacaipampa. The bus ride wouldn´t take nearly as long if they didn´t stop every 1 ½ hours to grab a snack or dilly dawdle. The sierra is quite a bit different then the tropical desert where I am located. The twisty road up the mountain is worth the annoyance because upon arrival the view is quite a bit more enjoyable then the all day dust devil marathons I´ve grown accustomed to. About 6 hours in we stopped in Chalaco where Mike and Casey live. Mike is another Peru 7 volunteer and Casey is a Peru 8 health volunteer. We grabbed a quick bite to eat and then hopped back on the bus to finish the journey to Pacaipampa.

When we arrived Jimmy greeted us with several kids who had made little posters welcoming us to the place they call home. We had to take a few precautions that weekend because there have been some recent protests there against the mining companies who want to start exploiting the region. It wasn´t exactly perfect timing for a bunch of white people to show up.

The first day we visited the chicken coop to get a feel for the business and pretty much just hung out. The second day Mike and I taught business lessons all morning covering topics such as marketing, accounting and transparency, reinvestment planning and internal controls. It was a pretty motivated group and I think things went well.

Perhaps the most fun part of the trip were the aerobic classes. For the past two months, Casey has been teaching aerobics in Chalaco. So we held two aerobic classes with some of the mothers, although mostly kids attended. It was quite fun because the classes end with dance aerobics. You should have been there for the freestyle hip-hop dance off. It was a riot. Fortunately it was the only one.