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.

Web Page Design

September 26th thru 28th, 2007 Lambayeque City, Peru

Business IST

I spent the past two days learning how to create web pages. That statement is quite different from this one: I spent the past two days being taught how to create a web page.

The Peru 7 business group all met in Lambayeque City in the department of Chiclayo to learn how to create web pages for our artisan associations. We each brought a counterpart from our village to learn alongside with us. Juan and I were pretty excited because our association is at the point where a webpage is actually necessary. Our excitement soon dissipated the second day of the conference. The first day Ivan gave a great presentation on e-commerce and how to apply the tools of the internet to grow your business.

The second day was the webpage designer´s turn to instruct us on how to build a simple webpage. He tried to teach by individually instructing each person what to do. After talking to Ivan, we were able to convince him to teach from the instructor computer with the aid of the projector. Unfortunately, he kept abandoning the instructor´s computer to work with people individually, thus leaving the other 35 individuals in the room to fend for themselves.

And fend for ourselves we did. Since we only had 4 more hours to learn this webpage stuff, a few of the other computer savvy volunteers and I abandoned our computers and huddled around one. Together we taught ourselves the basics and I believe we will each be able to explore from this base when we get back to site.

Right now our webpage is a joke. I hope to have the first basic version up and running by the 15th of December. You can find us at www.ceramica-encantada.com