Tuesday, June 30, 2009

El Contraste

I've been here in Peru for about five weeks now, and I wanted to share with you a few images that stand out in my mind. In many ways the contrast between the haves and the have-nots is ever-present, but there two times when it was made especially clear.

It was cloudy when I flew into Lima. We spent a good twenty minutes descending until we finally burst through the clouds so I could get a peek at the place I'd be spending the next three months. The very first thing I saw was an adobe shack with a bamboo roof. It was in a general state of disrepair and desperation, conditions that most of us could not imagine. The thing that stood out to me was that everyday modern marvels of aviation fly over the same poorly constructed bamboo roof. The planes overhead contain wealthy tourists, visitors, and people like myself who are lucky enough to study and travel, while the people in the house below could not afford to study or travel, even if it was their one and only desire.

The second image that stands out to me was something that happened just the other day. I was in Mancora, a small surfing town in North of the country, for an extended weekend. The town is full of rich tourists and surfers from all over the world. One morning I was walking along the beach when I noticed a Peruvian woman bathing her two naked children in the ocean. At that very moment an American man and his young son walked by on their way to go surfing. At one point the two children, the American boy in his wetsuit and surfboard in hand and the young naked Peruvian girl who had just finished bathing, were standing side by side. They were about the same size and age, but couldn't possibly have more different backgrounds. There is a sad and interesting contrast in this image between the white man and the native, the rich and the poor, that has deep roots and a complicated past. Even if we change the way we think, can we ever change the effects of centuries of abusive and racist policy?

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Food

Peruvians are very proud of their food. When I first got here everyone went out of their way to tell me how great the food is (especially in the North, they say). They would then rattle off three or four Peruvian dishes and tell me how important it was that I try them all. This made me wonder what kinds of foods I'm proud of as an American, and more specifically as an Oregonian. If a Peruvian came to stay with me for three days back home in the States, what would I make sure they tasted before they went home? I've put some serious thought into this, and I think it goes something like this:

Day 1
Breakfast--Homemade waffles with fruit and whipped cream, thick cut bacon and scrambled eggs. 
Lunch--Big Town Hero/Gandolpho's. American's have mastered the art of the submarine sandwich.
Dinner--Barbecued hamburgers, with blueberry cobbler for dessert.

Day 2
Breakfast--Denver Omelet
Lunch--Izzy's Pizza
Dinner--Barbecued Steak Marsala 

Day 3
Breakfast--
Lunch--
Dinner--

I need some help with day 3. Any suggestions??

Saturday, June 13, 2009

"Yo no espero nada del estado."

On Wednesday I made house visits with our social worker Joyce.  When the adolescent is still in review, one of the things we do is pass by their house to get to know the family and their living conditions.  Joyce asks about the parental relationship, educational background of the family, and so on.  I've made house visits before, but these were particularly shocking.

The first home was built of adobe with dirt floors.  There were large gaps between the sugarcane roof and the walls.  Four chickens were wandering around the living room, bobbing their heads and looking around as if it were their first time in the house.  There was an opening in the back wall, and I could see other animals just outside.  As we talked to the adolescent's mother, one of the chickens paused in the middle of the living room and crapped all over the floor.  Several minutes later three more chickens came down from upstairs.  The house, we find out, has electricity (a single wire runs up the wall and across the ceiling to a bare lightbulb), but no water or sewer.  Both parents dropped out of school in the first grade, and the mother can neither read nor write. 

About ten minutes away in taxi there's a Starbucks, where people spend more on a frappuchino than this familiy will make in two days. 

My point isn't to fire up a pity party.  There are people in this world who don't even have adobe houses or a single lightbulb, and we sat around and felt sorry for people who had less than us we wouldn't accomplish much.  These are deeply rooted problems that cannot be solved with a telethon, or sad Christian Children's Network commercials.  Thirty cents a day may help feed a child, which is a more than worthy cause, but what is being done to make sure these problems aren't being perpetuated to the next generation, and the next, and the next . . . ?

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

PerĂº, hasta ahora

There are a lot of interesting things I could tell you about Peru. The food is good, the traffic is unbelievably terrible, and for some reason the Jonas Brothers have managed to catch on here. 

But there are other less quirky, and much more tragic observations. The streets are littered with garbage, 70% of the police force is corrupt (not to mention corruption higher judicial and political levels), many streets aren't paved, and the ones that are are littered with wide and deep pot holes, etc. As I walk to and from work everyday and I see all of these problems in play, it is hard not to feel overwhelmed with the task at hand. I find myself wondering what I would do if I were the President, the Mayor of Chiclayo, or even the Chief of Police. I've only been here a week and a half, and I'm certainly no expert when it comes to political or social science, but it seems to me that if Peru, or any other country for that matter, wants to improve on its current state, the only true long term solution is to invest heavily in its young people. 

Here's the thing: every government ends up spending money on young people. If you ignore the needs of children and adolescents, you end up building juvenile detention centers, hiring more judges, paying more defense attorneys, expanding the police force, and so on. The adolescents who were ignored at the front end will pass through the system, learn to fear the police, develop no real life skills, contribute little if anything to society, and many will never really leave the penal system, costing the government a fortune in the process. This type of investment does make sense for anyone involved, not for the government and certainly not for the child. 

The alternative would be to invest heavily at the front end, to develop preventative programs for young people where they can develop skills and a sense of self worth. This would include investing in the community, encouraging various outreach programs and making sure that adolescents feel they have a place in society. The idea is to get creative when it comes to finding solutions to these problems. For instance, Chiclayo has a lot of kids who have dropped out of school in order to work and support their family. They also have a major problem with littering and garbage in the street. The government, or a private non-governmental agency, could start a series of after-school jobs that involved trash collecting. 

There are a million reasons why this would work. First, the agency would have to pay well, which would make the trash collecting jobs highly desirable. A 15 year old kid who works his hands to the bone driving a mototaxi all day long will be lucky to make $20 a week here. What if he found out that he could make $40 a week by picking up trash for 2 hours a day after school (which only amounts to $4 an hour)? These types of jobs would only go to at-risk children who would have to drop out of school otherwise. Now we've found a way to keep those kids in school, clean up the streets, and plant a seed of change in the culture that says its ok to litter. 

There are problems with my idea, of course. But the idea isn't to find fool-proof solutions that will solve all our problems right this second, the idea is to be having ideas, to be thinking of new and creative ways to approach these issues. Maybe there is no government agency who is going to hire kids to clean the streets, but what about a neighborhood coalition pooling together some money to hire a couple of troubled kids to clean their streets? What if each of us invested just a little bit of time to think about solutions, or to ask a local school if they needed volunteers? Maybe an increased effort on our part is the solution. 

It's not a sexy solution with photo-ops and ribbon cutting ceremonies. It won't present immediate results, which of course doesn't bode well for elected officials whose eyes are fixed squarely on the upcoming elections. But investing in our young people is the best way to make sure that we have a better tomorrow. I'd love to hear what you think.