More about Porvenir, maybe some repeated stuff...

hrm.. i seem to be blog happy these days..

So I recently found out that the corrugated roofs
that most of the families in porvenir and many in trujillo are made of asbestos... they're almost exclusively used in the Porvenir's schools....

Also, in Porvenir there are many people who cook using bricks of charcoal that burn for an entire day. When walking around Porvenir, you can smell this burning.. well its either that or all the trash fires.. none of this can be good for their health... There have been SKIP volunteers who have attempted workshops teaching the mothers how to do these simple adobe ovens with metal pipes as the chimney that would save quite a bit of money, but of that the group that attended i think it was only 1 family that made one. Change is hard to implement...

Have I written about safety already? Alot of guide books talk about how unsafe Peru is... I have found that it has been safe enough for me, though that's with some common sense about safety. I hardly ever go anywhere with more than 50 soles ($17). I never use my phone in public (if i can help it... if i feel particularly safe i'll pull it out to make a phone call, though with concealing it). Although I wear a ring Brentt gave me, the bead bracelet A gave me, and my earrings my mom gave me, I'm generally unflashy with my flip flops, worn out tshirt and sweatshorts.. Though as we bring in our boxes of random school supplies to the SKIP office, we have been warned that there are certain unsavory people who have been watching "the gringos"... at this point we need to be careful to lock our door behind us and make sure the door is shut the whole time (we have high walls with barbed edges as well). There was a time, not long ago that a few volunteers were held at gunpoint at the SKIP office (some convicted murder named Pato Negro or something).. they took a laptop, leather jacket (which the volunteer shouldn't have taken to SKIP in the first place), cell phone and lots of cash. Seems that it resulted in the police taking action and some sort of shootout happening by Indoamericano one of the schools we work with. Don't know much more about that...

Britta asked me today sort of what the living is like here because it's hard to imagine. I would say it is definitely something that is hard to understand unless you're there to see it. And even then, it's easy to forget when you return to your comfortable mattress, internet, and running water. Where I live, although it looks more like the dirty part of downtown Los Angeles (in regards to sketchiness and standard of living, not in regards to having large 20 story buildings..), I'm actually in the middle-class area... It's quite different from the dirt floor dirt brick houses of Porvenir. There are random sounds of sheeps on roofs, chickens clucking, the smell of something rotton, dog corpses... at the Plaza del Armas, which is relatively nice and clean (Center of town), you'll see an old beggar woman with arthritic hands asking for money (she's sat on the same spot every time i've gone to the center of town)... you see alot of folks like this. Not to mention the children asking you to buy something.