Changing direction

It's been a long time since the last time I wrote, lots of things have happened and I don't know where to begin to tell the story, or even if it's a story worth telling. I travelled to Puno, Lake Titicaca, La Paz and Arequipa with Simone, I quit my job, I'm about to start a new one--or if all goes well two new ones.

It took me over a month to begin to realise that Maricarmen had set up the volunteer project as a business, and about another month to realise I wasn't gonna change her or the way she ran things. It took me 2 days since I got back to Cusco from Bolivia to move out of her house (she told me to leave via email while I was travelling, and delighted my travel with daily rude emails), find a flat I'll share with 4 other people, and find 2 other paid jobs in Cusco.

I left the job because Maricarmen kept lying to me about the budget and the expenses. The final straw was after Crisitna came from Bolivia to see our project, and her boss Nick in London decided they'd send us volunteers but they wanted to see monthly budget report, and Maricarmen said this organization is not giving us any gifts and there is no reason why we should show them anything. I could go on and on abuot how manipulative she is, how she told me she knows I'm having a relationship with Simone and she is just waiting for proof to fire me, bacause it is completely unprofessional and (this is the best part!) I should ask my mother if it's professional to have a relationship with someone you work with (my parents met at work)...also, the quality of my work is very low considering I have a masters degree (absolutely true: how could I accept to work for someone who refused to show me a project description or a budget report and never gave me a contract). And here comes my favourite part...I came here to teach and not to learn, with the typical superiority of Europeans, while if she went to Europe she'd know how to work because she's travelled there, but she knows she'd be looked down upon like all Latinos in Europe (DEJA VU!!! I think I've heard something like that before!).

To all those people doing lines

You know the song Salvation by the Cranberries?
To all those people doing lines, don't do it, don't do it
Inject your soul with liberty, it's free, it's free

...to all those people doing lines, this is where (part of) it comes from.

Small impoverished farming jungle communities, where the economic opportunities include: working someone else's land in the burning sun and pouring rain, being paid by productivity and making between $3 and $4.50/day; construction work paid $4 to $6/day; backbreaking work moving stones to direct the course of the river, for a little higher salary; or if you're very lucky you might work in a little shop or restaurant. All work is temporary, all salaries are low and not constant, and (almost) everyone is poor/extremely poor (by IMF definition).

Otherwise you could take a taxi in the evening and go to the neighbouring town and work during the night stomping over coca leaves, the first step in making cocaine, for $30/day. It takes various kilos of leaves to make a few grams of cocaine. Great, so buying cocaine you're helping the Peruvian economy? Not quite.

Western governments have apparently decided to stop demand by destroying supply (brilliant!). So coca plantations, which constitute the livelihoods of many farmers in the jungle, are being sprayed with chemicals from US helicopters, and destroyed. Coca has always been part of the Peruvian and Andean culture in general, and for the most part it is not grown to produce cocaine. The chemicals used to destroy the plantations have destroyed other plants as well, and have caused cancer in people living there.

Cocaine, produced in the Peruvian jungle, is carried to different places (Bolivia, Brazil, and others) to be exported. Carriers are also well-paid, but given the risk involved, you must be pretty desperate to accept. The bus I took back to Cusco last night was stopped twice by policemen looking for cocaine: the search was the most approximate I've even seen: they got on the bus without dogs and with a couple flashlights, took down a few plastic bags and confiscated a couple bags of coca leaves that people were carrying to Cusco to chew or to make tea with. I doubt there was cocaine on the bus I was travelling on, but the night before I'd watched a horrible TV programme about the "successful" operation of a police unit against drug dealers. It showed a helicopter carrying thousands of dollars of cocaine money, being embushed when it landed, the two people on it being dragged down and shot dead as they tried to escape, and the money taken out of the plane. Aside from the close-ups of the two dead men, this "successful" operation involved the death of two poor men who were obviously not the drug lords the money was going to, and everything will continue as usual.

Story of a woman

A few days ago I went to my friend Alicia’s very simple wooden house, to confirm that she, her husband, and her daughters would come to eat the Italian dinner I had promised them. I knocked and opened the door (which doesn’t close and is tied with a string to a metal wire doorknob), calling her name. Her 7 and 9-year-old daughters came running to me from the little shop next door, saying their mother was gone and so was their father. They told me their parents had fought that morning, their father had beaten their mother, and then they had both left and hadn’t been back all day. They said their mother was hurt and they she was at the hospital; I knew she wasn’t because I’d spent the afternoon there with Simone, repainting the wall. The two girls Kaitlyn and Vivanda proceeded to tell me that their father is bad, bad, and he always beats their mother and had tried to beat them too. Their father is a guy my age with a smile permanently set on his lips, who works for Maricarmen and struts around Pilcopata in a bright red motorcycle. They said their father doesn’t want to eat what their mother cooks and makes them throw it away [one of women’s primary role is to take care of their husbands, refusing the wife’s food is a great offence, especially in families, like this one, where it is scarce]. The girls then told me their mother had come back the previous night soaking wet, they didn’t know from where, and that she often tells them she wants to die, and a few weeks before she’s drunk gasoline and ended up in hospital very sick. I asked them about school (and found out the younger daughter will start kindergarden as soon as her parents buy her the 5 notebooks she is required), and if they had food for dinner. They said no and I said I’d go back and bring them some food. When I returned to their house half an hour later, I knew from one of the workers that Alicia and her husband would be there. I arrived and asked Alicia to come out and go for a little walk. She came out wearing a long-sleeve turtleneck shirt and long pants (clearly the right clothes for this weather), saying: “I’m fine…why? Of course I’m fine, nothing happened”, as she limped and massaged her shoulder blade. [A week later she still had bruises on her arm]. Turns out she's reported the beatings to the police station repeatedly, with no result, and she wants to move out with her daughters and start running a little shop...but where? how? HOW?

And painting the fence of the health centre with Simone, talking about this and that, an idea began to develop for a project targeted to women victims of domestic violence...

In the mean time my journalistic carreer started, check out my first article on Diverse Traveller (click to open).

Silvio's back: part III

If you were here in Pilcopata with me, living in a hostel on the main road, surrounded by the no more than 10 brick houses in a town made of tin-and-wood barracks, you’d also be wandering where does the wireless connection I’m using come from…

Through this (very slow) wireless connection, Simone and I found out that Berlusconi- Bossi, unsurprisingly- surprisingly, are going to lead the 64^th Italian government in almost 63 years of Italy’s history as a republic. People and countries get the governments they choose and deserve—but I am upset, and fear that at some point the Great Mystery of Italy’s functioning in spite of half a century of bad governments might end. The BBC is probably one of the most generous foreign media towards “Mr. Berlusconi”, defining him a “corrupt buffoon”. Most Italian voters have probably never read a foreign newspaper, and I have probably read too many (at least compared to how much I read Italian newspapers). It’s easy to be a foreigner everywhere, because it somewhat detaches you from the responsibilities of citizenship; it is also easy to emigrate (as a highly skilled immigrant at the top of the socio-economic ladder—which is the type of emigrants our badly-governed Italy is increasingly donating to the better-governed rest of the EU). It’s also easy to criticize your country from the opposite side of the world, when (for reasons partly beyond your control) you couldn’t even vote in the last election, and thus are fully responsible for its outcome.

The reason partly beyond my control why I didn’t vote: I am in Peru with a tourist visa, and all my efforts to get a work or missionary visa failed. As a result, I am working illegally, I cannot open a bank account, I can’t register with AIRE (the agency for Italians living abroad) and therefore couldn’t register to vote. And next week I’ll go to Bolivia to renew my visa (get another 90-day tourist permit): I’m going with Simone and we’re planning to go to Lake Tititcaca, the floating islands, La Paz and maybe Arequipa (in Peru) on our way back. It’s going to be a 5-day trip, we think, and it might be the holiday I need.

A job like any other

This may come as a shock to you ripped-jeansed, faded-t-shirted, dreadlocked “alternative”, but development work is not a mission, it’s not a calling, nor a vocation; it’s just a job. A job you choose because you like it, because you are passionate about it, because you believe in it, or maybe because you can make good money in development careers, because you’re looking for adventure or want to see the world, because it’s varied and offers lots of opportunities for growth and change throughout your career.
As the daughter of two doctors who’ve explained to me and my brothers and to others, endless times, that being a doctor is no mission, it’s just a job, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised to find myself in the same situation: having to explain over and over, that development work is, also, a job like any other.
Here is the risk to fall in the typical attitude of many professionals: thinking that their own profession is the morally highest, most challenging, and most important in society. (Last year I had a flatmate who was an architect and firmly believed in the superiority of architecture over any other discipline or work. One evening I met a few of his colleagues and asked them if they shared this view, to which they answered: “Do you know how many architects it takes to change a light bulb?”—“I don’t know…”—“Just one, he stands holding the light bulb and waits for the world to turn under him”…please apply to the profession of your choice).
What I’m trying to say is: I like my job (most of the time, and I’m lucky), I believe in people (I can’t imagine doing any type of social work well if you don’t), I try to work as best I can and I am committed to what I do. And I see the exact SAME passion and commitment in my brother Stefano, studying and working in finance (investment banking the new “mission”?), and in my brother Lorenzo, the future Architect (but then we know architects…). We are all so into our “fields” that we spend endless afternoons with friends discussing development/finance/architecture, we read about anything related to our field, we find out about prominent people in the profession and how they work, we apply our interests and knowledge to the reality around us all the time. And there is a morality in this, which is not social work is moral while the private sector is immoral (imagine a world without businesses). Simply, everyone has the moral duty to do their job to the best of their abilities—and the more life hands you, the more you have the responsibility to give back, by developing and cultivating your talents and passions and applying them in society (in this respect my brothers and I have lots to give back).
But let me move away from talking about my brothers, you might think that my family sample is distorted by genetics of upbringing. I remember countless conversations in London in which my friend Fabiana, who studied development and worked in Benin and Burkina Faso (compared to Africa, work in Latin America is a joke), tried to convince people that development is a job like any other. Most of the time she failed. People often think they’re complimenting us development workers, telling us our job stands on a higher moral ground than the baker or the lawyer…but actually they’re making our life harder. When people tell me development work is a mission and a good development worker has a very different approach to work than a good business person or chef, they often imply a good development worker should sacrifice his/her life for their job. They also imply they should not care about money, make up, prestige, high-speed internet, wearing clean clothes/high heels/jewelry. I have lived in a house with no running water and showered out of a bucket, I have lived in a house with people with whom I had no common languages and tried to learn their language, I have lived in houses where we ate the same (deep-fried, over-sugared) staple foods every day, where we drank dirty water and washed our clothes in a stone sink with one cup of water and hung them on barbed wire to dry, houses where if it had been my life, as a woman, I would have been confined to the cooking-and-cleaning and attending-to-the-men. Now (in Cusco) I live in a gorgeous 3-floor house with hot showers, high-speed internet and a washing machine, I wear make-up and blow-dry my hair. Am I doing my job any worse than I was when my living conditions were more basic? Or would I do a better job if I didn’t have those comforts? Or am I in the wrong sector because I enjoy wearing skirts and talking to my family on skype every few days?
(Just in case you’re wondering, I’m not doubting myself, the answer to all these questions is: definitely not).
Most the people who really sacrifice their life to development work, living in absolute poverty and giving up all earthly possessions, are religious missionaries (hence the mission—calling—to live a certain type of life). I always think about the priest in City of Joy who goes to live with the poor in a slum in Calcutta, or Alex Zanotelli, an Italian missionary priest who lived and worked in slums in Nairobi for 12 years (and wrote a great book titled “Korogocho”). I admire and respect their work, but development workers are no missionary priests. At night they like to go out and invest $5 in a dinner and drink, thus contributing to the economy of the country where they are more than if they starved in a slum.

Pilcopata's revenge aka its attempts to make me like it

Back in the jungle and I feel like my life is a videogame and I just passed on to the next level of difficulty: only one eye! Last Thursday night as I was taking off my contact lenses I dropped one and could not find it; my eyesight is really bad and I need to have my contact lens remade in Italy, mailed to Cusco and, in the fortunate event in which it would get there, go and get it, because it would really be pushing my luck to have it sent to Pilcopata (my USB was given to a woman who was supposed to come on Saturday and arrived this morning). [My first investment when I move back to Europe and begin to work will be eye surgery, to solve all these problems for the rest of my life].
The Peruvian jungle is stunningly gorgeous and the town of Pilcopata is impressively ugly. The trip here took us 10 hours in a bus with bad breaks and two exhausted drivers, a rain storm chasing us and a landslide that blocked the road for 2 days right after we arrived. I traveled here with Simone, the volunteer, and two Italians working in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Cristina and Marco, who came to evaluate our project and see if we can cooperate and if Cristina’s boss in London wants to send us volunteers. It looks like she approved the project, if we can overcome a few technical difficulties such as my (as yet) inability to be here and in the Sacred Valley simultaneously.

Let me tell you a bit about the interesting town of Pilcopata and its inhabitants. We arrived and were told that Simone could go and live in the rooms in the parish church: I went to see them and found out the priests had traveled to Cusco and the rooms need to be repainted and restructured completely before any volunteer can live there. Yesterday the priests got back and I see what may have caused the planning difficulties—consider that in Pilcopata there is no cell phone reception, no private land lines, and none of the people I work with use Internet, which leaves two possible systems of communication: 1) call the public phones and ask the person answering to pass the phone to the person you want to talk to or deliver a message, or 2) have a letter hand carried and delivered by someone traveling here.
Now consider my (failed) attempts to communicate with the priests before coming:
A few weeks ago I had Fredy carry a letter to the priests. He says he delivered it, the priest says he never got it.
Maricarmen says the priests called a couple weeks ago saying the rooms were ready for the volunteers; the priest today told me he’d called saying they were not ready and there was still a lot of work to do.
I’d called repeatedly asking to speak to the priests or to tell them to call me back, and never received any call. Simone and I had to introduce ourselves to Maricarmen’s father about 6 times during the first couple days here, till we decided he must be senile. He them told me that he is actually almost blind. He is also the person in charge of answering the public phones and delivering messages. Lots of things suddenly make sense…

Also, Maricarmen insisted I go and live in her house in construction in her land a bit out of Pilcopata. I’d told her before coming that it scared me to go and live there because it’s dark and isolated, but she insisted it was safe [“Nobody has ever been raped in Pilcopata”(…)]. When I arrived the house was full of mud, wood and other construction materials, the second floor is completely missing, there is no running water, electricity, furniture or windows…but other than and the fact there are snakes it’s ready to live in it. I told her it wasn’t ready and after accusing me of spending lots of the project’s money because of being scared to live in her house and changing plans at the last minute, finally last night she agreed that “of course” the house is not ready, after all her construction workers had been telling her for almost a week.

Things here are quite slow and it’s interesting that a volunteer coordinator lived here for almost one year because no one knows about the project. Working here is not easy because the school director is very rude, the priests don’t have the money to buy the materials to restructure their parish, and it’s going to be very difficult to find host families because people are overall much poorer than in the Sacred Valley. But at least the doctor is young and very active and there are 4 medical students doing their internships here.

You need to have reached a sort of inner peace to enjoy life in Pilcopata (and it helps if you like hot weather), you need not to be after gorgeous Argentine men (or any other gringo) and preferably not care much about any of the following: social life, shopping, night life, winter clothes, cultural events, nice looking hair or overall nice looks. Admittedly I am very much into most of the above—especially the Argentine men, and I am incredibly disturbed by how horrible my bangs look!—and yet I don’t see the contradiction between that and my wanting to do development work. Is there one? Here there is lots of time to do non-internet-requiring work, read (currently reading Salman Rushdie's "Midnight Children": brilliant!), think, write, and movies are extremely cheap, Simone and I bought 19 movies for 18 soles (4euros) and have been watching them (movies watched since arrival in Pilco: Motorcycle Diaries, Children of Heaven, Ratatouille, Shreck 3, The Simpsons).

Yesterday we met Sofie, a girl from Belgium doing an internship in the hospital here, and we told her to come and eat pizza with us tonight, made by Orisson (the guy who is currently renting and running Maria's hostel where Simone and I are living) in the brick oven…definitely good! She came and she’s very nice—we had a nice evening with her and a tourist from New Hampshire, who spent some time around Lake Tititcaca studying birds, and (not surprisingly) answered all of our conversation attempts with one word answers.

Living the gringo life

Timing's never been my thing, but I'm beginning to get sick of my horrible timing! (Or maybe it's all part of my Personal Legend). Tomorrow morning I am leaving for the jungle for an unspecified period of time between 10 and 40 days. I'm not gonna hide I'm not looking forward to it: the heat, humidity, and insects are not for me. I finally understand perfecty all the people coming from hot climates complaining about the New Hampshire cold non-stop. When the climate doesn't fit you everything becomes so much harder! Also, I'd just began to enjoy the Cusco good life, aka meeting gringos and going out with them. Of course most of the people I met are tourists staying for a few days (adding to my horrible timing-related distress!), but a few are here learning Spanish or volunteering and staying a few months. It's been fun to go out to eat and drink, even though with my "salary" (if you dare call it so) I can't even afford a quiet gringa social life in Cusco.

Cristina, the woman from the Bolivian/ British organization that might want to work with us is here visiting the project. Tomorrow I am travelling to Pilco with her, her boyfriend and Simone. Tonight I met Doug, a volunteer who will be living in Pilco in May and June.

So let's hope lots of interesting griunguitos come by Pilcopata...the one in the picture is me--now, I'm sure you can picture me in the jungle! I miss weaing skirts, I had a dream the other night that I was home and looking for a skirt in my closet!