Pucallpa, i.e. South America Part 2

Well, I've had a lot of suggestions, both subtle and not-so-subtle, that I should post more often -- you know shorter but more frequent entries. And when Mike and I left for South America I thought, well, maybe when we get back I'll try that. And since getting back, I have indeed been trying that. And you can see the results. Almost two months back and just now on my second entry. Don't get me wrong, I agree that posting more often would be great. I like reading blogs with frequent updates.

But I think I understand why it's so hard for me to do the same. My day job keeps me at a computer so much that in the evening and on weekends, turning a computer on is just about about the last thing I ever want to do. I do everything I can to avoid it. Case in point: Mike, as more a member of the internet generation than I, and as someone who does not spend all working hours on the computer, will want to look up a phone number and so heads towards whitepages.com while I panic and say "no! don't turn it on! use the phone book!" And truthfully, turning the computer on is a slippery slope -- a few minutes to work on a blog leads to emails waiting in the inbox and this and that to look up, and before I know I've just spent all sorts of precious non-work time doing the same things (different content, of course, but still) that I do for such a large majority of the weekday hours. I just don't like my job enough to channel it like that when not at work.

So, all that to say, I agree in principle, and I really do like keeping you all updated, but it's just hard to make myself do it more often. Maybe once I become a fuller time farmer and a lesser time academic-y office worker I'll be more excited about blogging on off-time :). But for now, I'll keep the suggestions fully in mind and keep trying to strike some sort of balance between my computer-avoidance and my desire to write to you.

All that said, I still need to tell you about part 2 of our trip to South America, i.e. Pucallpa. Pucallpa is where I spent 2002-2003 eating lots of bananas, learning lots of Spanish, and interviewing lots of farmers in the jungle about agriculture and forestry and challenges and opportunities etc etc etc. As many of you know, I found it a lovely place to be, and I remain really fond of Peru. I went back to visit in 2005 on the tail-end of a dissertation-research-site-sleuthing-out-trip to Brazil (where I didn't end up doing dissertation research in the end), but hadn't been back since. So it was lovely to see old friends again. My friend Martha's youngest daughter, who had been 6 when I lived with them, was 13 and so obviously much had changed :).


Pamela, Martha, and me


We went to the zoo and Pucallpa's "natural park"


We also got to be "witnesses" to James' (Martha's 2nd oldest son) marriage proposal to his girlfriend. (This is the after-picture.)

As usual, we took a couple little side trips down the long and winding road (it actually is long and winding, and eventually goes all the way to Lima) to visit other people I had lived with and/or known while doing interviews in the countryside. Unfortunately, many of them were out of town, in other parts of Peru visiting family for Christmas/New Year's (it was the perfect time for Mike and I to take enough time off to go to South America, as my office gets really really quiet that time of year, but apparently it was also the perfect time of year for others to take time off too... note to self). So it was of course a little disappointing to get to the farm of Naty and Nicanor after many years away plus a the 3 hour ride and 1 hour walk from Pucallpa (during which I could hardly recognize the road or the entrance to their place it had changed so much) and just find house-sitters, leave them a note and a calendar with pictures of the Wenatchee valley, and walk back out to try and find a car to take us back.


The entrance to the road where Naty and Nicanor live

But that's how it goes, and still it was really fun to show Mike the old haunts, and for Martha and Pamela and I to see how it had changed, even if we didn't get to see as many old friends as we would have liked.

Meanwhile, change was by far the theme of the trip. First hints were in Lima, where we had walked into a supermarket near where I used to stay when in town, and it was now under new management, and was in fact one of the fanciest supermarkets I'd ever seen -- deli counter, people with free samples on trays, the works. For Minnesotans, think Kowalsky's. Of course it's always funny what's normal and what's not in different places, but Mike put it pretty well -- "You mean," he said, "there are supermarkets like Kowalsky's but you can't flush toilet paper down the toilet and the government can't control the water supply?" Yes.

"Modernization" grows differently in different places at different times I suppose. In San Alejandro, an hour from where Naty and Nicanor live, there didn't used to be electricity or running water when I had been there, but now as soon as electricity came in, even just for a few hours a day, there were computers and internet cafes and cell phone towers to replace the town's 2 public phones. In fact there was cell phone coverage in areas that no way would ever have cell phone service in Washington state -- I mean, our house hardly has cell phone service in Washington state, and we only get internet via satellite.

Anyway, when I had been back in Peru in 2005, Lima had changed quite a bit in the two years that I had been gone (new buildings, fanciness, etc.), but Pucallpa had been pretty much the same. So coming from Lima, I was wondering if the same would hold true this time. It didn't. Pucallpa changed amazingly in five years. I had a hard time figuring out where I was in "downtown" because where previously there had been a few bigger cement buildings next to some smaller wooden ones, now almost everything in the town center was big and shiny and made of "noble materials" (the word used for bricks or cement or whatever isn't plywood).

And Martha's house was different -- they had upgraded from plywood walls to boards, and from a scraggly wooden fence when I had lived there to a nice-boards wooden fence in 2005 to a brick fence (i guess it's called a wall) with a door with a lock and a key in 2009. James (who recently graduated college) and Augusto (Martha's husband) both had found jobs which provided them motorcycles for transportation. The shower was now located inside the house in a bathroom rather than as buckets out in the backyard (although Martha said she couldn't quite adjust to showering inside and still used the buckets outside. I had to agree with her, although I didn't know why until Mike noticed when he tried showering outside that the water outside was not as cold as inside, because it had been heated up by the sun. And of course in 100 degree weather, cold water showers are great (especially with no other option) but of course there's cold and then there's cold.)

Martha's family now had a sink with running water in the morning and evening (but not midday). And they had a refrigerator (although still no culture of buying food ahead of time and storing it in the fridge -- Martha still goes to the market everyday and mostly uses the fridge for keeping leftovers -- although note that when we left a pot of rice and meat and plantains out overnight (out of pre-fridge habit), the part of it that Martha was worried about having gone bad in the 100 degree heat was the plantains. And she was right, the meat was fine (speaking of which, the Shigella bacteria I thought I brought back from South America actually turned out to be E.coli, and I'm pretty sure that was from lebanese schwarma on the street in Paraguay). Martha's family now has a computer in the house, no internet though -- and no shampoo -- just laundry soap in the shower -- (not that shampoo is computer related, but it reinforces this idea of different cultural prioritizations than we might have in the U.S. in terms of which you would buy first -- shampoo or a computer).

The population of Pucallpa had also grown tremendously, and there were rumors that a supermarket might be going in soon in the place of one of the open air markets (which, for nostalgia reasons is a little sad mostly because Peruvian markets are awesome, but maybe also because now instead of 50 vendors making a living selling little bags of fava beans, one supermarket owner employs 20 people and makes the profits... although maybe the 20 new employees with steady work no matter who buys their fava beans is an improvement itself... who knows...).


Juice bar section of one of Pucallpa's markets

Anyway, many more streets were paved, there were new traffic lights, and the number of motocars had multiplied.


Mototaxis in the market

And there was a cathedral in the center square. Which was actually a good lesson for me. When I had been in Peru before, there was always the sense of "Oh, the government or such-and-such company had said they were going to do X, but we haven't seen anything" or "It's been like that for years with lots of talk and no action," and of course there's still that sense in many areas, but really, lots of things had changed big time. In 2005 I remembered hearing the story that someone was raising money to put a cathedral into Pucallpa's central square because "all good latin american cities have cathedrals in their center square" but they had started building and ran out of money, and were running an unsuccessful campaign to get more. I had figured thus that the cathedral might never happen, and wondered if that was really such a bad thing anyway. But instead I came back and... it was done -- and actually it was a really cool modern design cathedral, very neat looking. So things do change, even when you think they won't.

Probably by far, though, the biggest changes were along the road to Lima. In 2002-03 (and in 2005), it took 24 hours by bus to get to Lima, through the jungle, over the Andes and down the other side. It was only about 500 miles, so mapquest in the U.S. would probably pin it at 10 hours, but the roads were problematic. Where paved there were huge potholes that required driving on the wrong side of the road and slowing down to 5 mph. Where not paved (i.e. most of it) the road was dusty in summer and mud in winter, subject to landslides that would hold up traffic for days. There was little besides forest on the side of the road in between the few towns scattered here and there. Often it was secondary (i.e. previously logged) forest, but still pretty dense growth. For years people said that the government had promised to pave the road, or at least to send construction equipment to clear out landslides regularly, but that it never happened. All my interviewees in 2002-03 said that road transportation to markets was one of their biggest barriers to making a living in agriculture. And now all of a sudden (well, for me all of a sudden), the road had in fact been paved.


Asphalt! (and power lines!)

There was one section still remaining to be completed, but really it was amazing. Although of course interesting in some expected and some unexpected ways.

First, it used to be that if you needed to get from one place to the next, you'd stand on the side of the road and either a shared taxi or a random truck would pick you up and for a small amount of money would take you where you had to go. Each of these vehicles would end up filled to the brim, with 6-7 people in the normal seats and 3-4 people (plus packages) in the trunk (think station wagon model trunk). Every time you passed a town people would come over to the vehicle to sell you little plastic baggies full of juice or cheese wrapped in paper or nuts or whatever.

But this is different now, mostly because now cars go 50 mph instead of 15 mph. And they cover the distance in easily 1/2 to 2/3 the time of what it used to take. And so they stop less to pick people up, because it slows them down in ways it hardly used to. And the ladies selling cheese are still around but they don't bother to come up to the cars, because the cars pass them at 30 mph instead of 5 mph. And you can actually get that cheese in Pucallpa rather than only at Km 86 on the road, because it's so much easier and more reliable to transport it there.

But drivers still pack their vehicles as full as they can. And so while it used to actually be fairly safe to ride in the trunk of a station wagon with no seatbelts as your car swerved to the wrong side of the road to get around a pothole, now, with paved asphalt and cars coming around curves at 60 mph in both directions, it seems a lot more dangerous. And in fact, there were all sorts of new stories that I had never heard before about someone being killed by a car when walking on the side of the road (which used to be just fine to do -- but of course when you can now more accurately almost call it walking on the side of the highway, it becomes not so fine). And so sitting on a little cushion placed on top of the parking brake in the front seat with no seat belt availability trying to keep my knees out of the way of the driver's stick shift seemed less sensible than it used to be (and not just because I'm getting older and so potentially more risk-averse -- I think it's actually just a different ballgame now).

The other new thing about the road paving project was the impact it had on the sides of the road. Martha hadn't gone down the road in a while either, and so as the two of us were trying to recognize houses where we had stopped years earlier in order to visit, we were doing so by looking for "the place with 2 wooden houses on the side of the road near the curve with the big hill on one side." And now of course the curves were a bit different because the paving project had changed the trajectory of the road a little here and there, and had made everything zoom by faster, and even more importantly, where there had been 2 houses there were now 10. And the wooden houses we remembered had been replaced by new construction projects.


Fancy new houses

Because before, living in that spot had been fairly isolated despite being on the main road -- it had involved a 10 km walk to the nearest town, or a 30 minute ride in a passing vehicle. But now if you could get a car to stop for you (which people actually generally could, despite the lack of cheese purchases through car windows), it was a 10-15 minute ride, easy to get to school, to work somewhere in a town, to get your produce to market.

As such, the roadside forested areas had been cleared for new houses and new towns, and actually, it reminded me of the roads in the Brazilian Amazon. Turns out that perhaps the Brazilian Amazon had just been 15 years "ahead" on the "development" scale than the Peruvian Amazon. So no more locating yourself by house landmarks or big tree landmarks (although the fast-growing tree species that the organization I had worked with was encouraging had in fact gotten really big).

It's of course the typical Amazon story. You build (or pave) a road, and people come to live by it and build houses and cut down trees and farm, and when the soil fertility runs low, they bring in cattle to graze. We saw way more cows than I had remembered.


More grass, fewer trees, more cows (but not in this picture)

And in town, the borders of town had spread much further out, classic expansion of urban areas and changing definitions of what is considered rural. Certainly many more conveniences and really useful amenities but of course a different feel alongside that.

Meanwhile, some things had stayed quite the same. For example, we arrived to the house of one family I had previously stayed with, an older couple, although the woman's husband had since died (and she had decided not go away for Christmas/New Years). The younger guy who had lived with them and helped out with the farming was home, but said that Nieves, the woman, had left to go to town to cross the river to another parcel where she had planted corn, but if we hurried we might be able to catch her at the port (of course). So we drove to town and through to the port, with no sign of her. We asked the people waiting for boats, we asked the people selling gasoline, no one had seen her that day. The gas people, though, pointed us to a store, owned, they said, by Nieves' daughter-in-law. Still no sign of Nieves but the daughter-in-law suggested we take a motocar back to the town center and look for her there. As we headed back out, we passed a motorcycle, and Martha, the motocar driver, and I all turned our heads to look at the woman riding on the back of it. It was (of course) Nieves! So we turned back around and went back to the daughter-in-law's store and sat with Nieves over a drink of barley juice (non-fermented).

Nieves had been planning to go with her son across the river to see if the corn they had planted was ready, and if it hadn't been eaten by birds, to harvest a little. Having found all of us at the port, however, she suggested to her son that he just go alone. "How about we all go?" I (of course) suggested. "No," she said (again, of course), "it's better if he just goes alone quickly and then comes back, and we can just sit here and talk." Then the son had a hard time finding a boat that could take him across, and so of course somehow in the process of trying to help him a boat and someone to drive it, the plans changed, and there was a bigger boat available and Nieves said "Yeah, maybe we all could go!" So we all of course pile into this boat -- Nieves, her son, Martha, Pamela, Mike, me, and the boat driver -- and head across the river with machetes.


Looking for a boat


Into the boat we go

Everyone got a good laugh off the gringos chopping corn stalks with machetes, the corn got harvested faster with six than it would have with two (or one), and we headed back to the port then back through town and back to Nieves' house for lunch, unexpected (yet predictable) adventure accomplished.





In any case, it was great to be back in Peru. I still really like it there. And I like that Mike can now put faces to names and connect stories with places. And we ate a lot of really yummy food. Actually shortly after returning to the States we both (and my bro Yoni, who was visiting and goat-sitting!) went to Portland (I had a meeting there) and we went out to a Peruvian restaurant, where Mike commented on how much he had missed the food in the week since we had been back. Ah, Peruvian food, yum. Maybe we'll have to figure out how to take a few months sabbatical someday and go back for a little longer (probably a long time from now, though, once Peru will have most certainly changed significantly again).

Anyway, I guess that's it for part 2 of South America. Stay tuned for catch-up on our winter goat milking adventures and the growing flock of chickens. Probably not in the next few days, but whenever I can next stomach a weekend computer session for the good of the goat-beard-blog.