“Love is no big truth. Driven by our genes we are simple selfish beings.”
-Kings of Convenience

Regardless of whether or not you agree with those words (I can neither agree nor disagree with them at this point – I’m still thinking, and of course it doesn’t really matter if they’re true or not), the song is great and they at least invite introspection. Ha! I bet you all thought I was going to forget my promise to write more blogs. Well, isn’t it comforting that even a lame old married couple can still surprise? Admitted, it is a mundane surprise, and it has been about a month and a half. . . Anyway.

Blogs are inherently self-absorbed little exercises, and in light of that truth, I will attempt to make this one more outward-reaching. A huge burst of happiness to Jodie and Brian Smith in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and their new baby, Carter, who was born on June 27th at 4:30am. It is for Jodie’s sake that I began to create paragraphs on the blog instead of the long, medieval, block format that I was using previously. I have now implemented spaces between the paragraphs, thanks to a recent moment of innovative forethought.

Another huge burst of happiness for the gigantic music care package that Sean sent me sometime around my birthday and that I received sometime in early June. Thanks, brother. You are missed.

Angela and I are doing quite fine. As always, the experience is inconsistent in its level of comfort. Yesterday was rough, today is nice – that sort of thing. The weather appears to be warming up a bit early this year, as it is only august (supposedly the coolest month of the year) and only the late afternoons and nights are chilly. There has been no fog to keep things chilly throughout the morning. Hopefully this is not an indicator of an abnormally hot summer to come. Regardless, the weather is consistently beautiful. We have been kicking out some English classes two nights a week with a group of young adults (and the occasional full adult). They are going well. The students are participating in a community clean-up day today, in “payment” for the free classes. The system seems to be working, as they all showed up yesterday to help with notifying the population of the town door-to-door. I realized yesterday how small Tecapa really is. Three groups of people talked to someone at each and every home in the course of about an hour and a half. It is small. You can walk at a leisurely pace from the any entrance to any exit of the town in about five minutes. It is small. It is difficult to explain how the level of disorganization could be so great in such a small community, but you must see it to believe it. I also realized yesterday, though, that somehow Angela and I are in some ways exempt from this mutual distrust (at least on the surface). That is comforting and will help us to continue working. This little one hour clean-up event this morning will be the first full-community event that we are participating in since arriving in Tecapa almost 8 months ago. It remains to be seen how it will go off. It would surprise us little if it fizzles out like a fart on the wind. But it is the hope that drives us, no? Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.

In addition to English classes, Angela and I have been teaching computer classes at the local internet cabina (it is not a café). They are quite successful and we have three separate classes per week. We are going to have to start an additional class next week. It is admittedly very nice to finally feel like we are “doing something.” That is, in the sense that we are doing something more concrete that the stuff we were doing for the first months. I apparently fall into the group of people that gain a sense of peace from my own perceived productivity. Thank you, United States of America. Luckily, I am also good at rationalization, so my definition of productivity is more in line with the soft goals of Peace Corps – cultural interchange and things of that sort. “Intercambio,” as it is called here, to Peruvian smiles and slow, thoughtful nods of deep understanding. One word is all that is necessary. It has been truly helpful to see this experience as not one of teaching, but of learning. Yeah, that stuff helps me feel better, but I cannot quite get away with just that, as made obvious by my role as a teacher in the classes we are teaching. The progress and productivity is apparently really good for my mental state. Not that surprising.

Through the miracle of time, it is now tomorrow, Friday, July 20, and morning again. I am here in our little “kitchen” room (the room that is not the bedroom) typing away on our Stone Age laptop and sipping South African tea brought back to Peru from the United States. Thank you, globalization. Yesterday, we had the clean-up event and it was really, for lack of a better word, awesome. All our English class students came out to help, as well as many community members that had no real incentives other than internal ones, and we ended up working for over two hours instead of the hour we had planned (realizing that maybe little Tecapa is a lot dirtier than we all thought). Also, although we did a lot of work, the clean-up was actually the idea of a group of community members, which makes it even better. I can’t say what a great feeling it is to have something go better than expected. And everyone really seemed engaged, people weren’t just dicking around. And to top it all off, it was actually kind of fun (for them, of course it was fun for us). Everyone was working in a big group and making fun of each other and laughing – it wasn’t like forced labor or anything. We will post pictures on facebook. It wasn’t a huge deal, I know, one little event, but the confidence that it gives people to continue trying to do more is sorely needed in Tecapa. Also, it is a way of taking young people that are somewhat engaged and curious and showing them how simple it is to do something important and necessary. With any hope, it is a first step toward more action here in Tecapa, and it cannot be overstated how important this small thing actually is. So that was that.

For the past two weeks, the teacher’s union here in Peru has been on strike. The union is very powerful and includes most teachers nationwide. Peru has rather progressive labor regulations for a growing Latin American country, and the strike was met with fierce resistance, some use of the military, and some jailing of union leaders, but overall it has been little more than a hot debate between the government and the teacher’s union. As is the usual custom, other labor sectors chose to strike along with the big teacher’s union to express solidarity and, in some cases down south and in the mountain areas (where labor is much more organized and radical), to wreak havoc. At the very least, the strike has stopped all classes for the past two weeks. I don’t want to get too negative here, but to me the strike has been damaging and unjustified. Of course, there are many others who have different ideas, but the only real support for the strike here in this area of the coast is among teachers themselves. The main point of the strike has been an attempt to roll back the new government policy about teacher capacitations. Last year, the teachers of Peru were given a test to assess their abilities in basic subjects such as math and Spanish. To the surprise of almost no one at all, the tests came back with piss-poor results, the most frightening of which being that over half of the teachers did not pass the basic math test. Results in other areas were also discouraging. The government, apparently balancing the surplus of teachers in Peru (there are thousands of people educated to be teachers that are unable to find jobs) and the strength of the union, did not fire a single teacher. Instead, they created a nationally-sponsored program of local capacitations or workshops for teachers. Some teachers are required to attend workshops each Saturday, in which they are being taught about the subjects that they scored so poorly on. These teachers attending the workshops will eventually be re-taking the competency exams. If they fail to pass the competency exam after a certain number of tries (I think it is 3), they will be fired and replaced. To me, this all sounds completely reasonable. There were many other routes the government could have attempted to take in their reform. I, and many parents of school-aged children, believe that it is completely reasonable, if not lenient. This is the main point of contention of the teacher’s union. There are other, less important reasons for this strike. The union wants to privatize the school system and have local people pay their own teachers’ salaries, but this effort seems misguided and not really valid as a reason to strike. Governments with much better education systems (i.e., the USA) still rely heavily on government funding for public education. Why would such a horrible education system benefit from this, aside from possibly causing consolidation of students into larger, urban, and hopefully better schools? Also, this is an issue that can be worked out through mediation – striking further alienates teachers from the communities that they are working in. And there was the same worn-out bullshit about low wages. Yes, like teachers all over the world, Peruvian teachers do not earn enough. But unlike teachers all over the world, they often earn a lot more than the families of the students that they are teaching, at least outside of major urban centers. In reality, this strike has been, in my eyes, a manifestation of teachers’ violent resistance to education reform in a country badly in need of it. The simple and unavoidable result of education reform in Peru is that many teachers will lose their coveted jobs. The education system is in need of reform in large part due to the obvious inadequacies of teachers. Certainly, schools do not receive enough funding for materials and such, but teachers could do much better with the small amount of materials available. The truth is, though, that these same teachers are unwilling to take even basic steps necessary to become better teachers. Their job performance, in most cases, also shows a lack of real interest in education, and in many cases, they are doing just well enough not to make it worth the effort to replace them. I am in no way anti-union. I believe that labor organization in this country is a necessary and welcome progression. But strikes like this one show the dark underside of labor organization and give conservative, anti-union, pro-business activists (already much more powerful than unions anyway) firepower in their crusade to show organized labor as a bunch of self-serving socialists preventing the free market from improving their mediocrity. This fantasy of organized labor as the bane of capitalism and progress, which has been proven completely absurd so many times in the past, continues to be believed by many. The truth being, of course, that organized labor has its good and bad points just as free market capitalism has its good and bad points. Unfortunately, this strike has done nothing more than add to the negative image of (badly needed) organized labor here in Peru, along with depriving students of two weeks of classes that they badly need. (sorry jodie, no place to put a paragraph)

Deep breath, moving on. Angela and I are about to spend over a week out of site. We are leaving for Lima to do some work (Angela will be working with a Peace Corps-designed group to assess and train volunteers to deal with gender issues in development and I will be working with some other environment volunteers to rework the community diagnostic that we were asked to do upon arriving in our sites in order to improve it for the next group of volunteers coming in September) early next week and then will be taking a vacation for Fiestas Patrias (Peruvian Independence Day) to Huaraz, Ancash, at the foot of the Cordillera Blanca, the highest tropical mountain range in the world. These things are huge – many peaks are over 6000 meters (more than 18,000 feet). Angela and I are planning on doing some hiking and camping while in the mountains for the short time that we have, and we are going with a group to summit Ishinca, a 5500 meter, snow-covered peak that is easily accessible without technical climbing. It is a first for us, and we are both nervous and excited (as we currently have been living at about 90 meters for the past 8 months). Of course, we heard yesterday that some Portuguese climber just died yesterday near where we will be hiking, but that is not normal and it is certain that he was climbing a much more challenging peak in the area. More on all that afterward. It’s been a challenging and great last two weeks or so, which makes it a good time to bust out of routine and head to parts unknown. I really missed home this July, as 4th of July is one of my favorite times of year and most of my good friends got together in San Diego for a big blowout party. Also, Stacy’s birthday and hearing my nieces growing up on the phone makes it hard not to want to be there. But the progress here in site and this vacation will calm those feelings and remind me why I could not be anywhere other than where I am right now. Buck up and enjoy the moment. Regret and nostalgia are silent killers of new experience and growth. Love to all from me and that girl I live with that hath no blogging abilities. As Benjamin Cranklin Sterling Hill would say (thanks for the update from Mexico, Frank) peace in your crease.

Patty