Week One at Pisco sin Fronteras, part 2
On Thursday I stayed in and set stuff up on my computer, so I can get back to building web sites and doing other research. This was part of the deal I struck with PSF; there are a few volunteer organisations I've helped set up web sites for, but it's a bit of a hodgepodge to maintain, and I want to get them all on some easy-to-edit system. I plan to do this one day a week during my entire trip through the Americas and Europe.
On Friday I helped with two concrete pours. Normally it takes a whole day to do one, so people were impressed that we did two, even though their being a block apart made this relatively easy. The first one was for a daycare centre, and that's where most of these photos are taken from. (I haven't posted these to flickr yet, BTW, so if you click on these, they'll go to their respective FaceBook albums.) We still had time left over after that, so we cleaned some rubble from the street adjacent to another job site, and took it to the tip.
We work half a day on Saturdays, so yesterday morning I helped put up a few tarp walls in a 'house' in the slummiest place I've seen. The family literally didn't have a pot to piss in; there was a section in their yard where they went instead. It'd be nice to provide them with something better, but there's no sewerage in their part of town.
Actually, officially it's not even a part of town. The settlement materialised when people displaced by the earthquake wandered there, and the City was too busy dealing with issues of title to do much about it. A lot of people actually lost their land and houses earthquake, because both them and the City lost copies of their title.
In any case, these people have a concrete floor now, so they're stoked, and the kiddies don't have to play in the dirt anymore. And like pretty much all of the people we help, they offered to make us lunch. And like pretty much everyone in Perú, they don't understand vegetarians, so I politely declined. It's okay; the same thing routinely happened to me when I lived in Malaysia.
The weekend was highlighted by two pisshead parties-I encourage you click those links and enjoy the photos. Yep, we're about a hundred Burners crammed into space designed to house about 70, and since we want to make sure the organisation keeps its good name, drug laws are respected enough that it's mostly a Peruvian beer called Cristal and local rum that gets consumed. Not quite my scene, but I enjoy photographing the results, and I really do want to try a Pisco Sour; I suspect I'll like it a lot more than that horrible beverage rachaelbrennan introduced me to in Botswana.
Today was shopping and the beach. The water was too cold for swimming all week, so I left my board shorts at home... only to find the water reasonably warm today. But some of the guys, and Gringo the dog, played frisbee with me.