Canete

Before I went to The States I went to visit to a small town, Canete, about an hour outside of Lima. I went with Lucia's brother, Francisco, to help build some houses. Really, all of the credit goes to Francisco and his friends. They've been going to this same neighborhood for the past year helping these people live a more healthy and happy life. I was just tagging along to see how many measurements I could screw up or how many of my fingers I could crush while attempting to use a hammer. I'm not exactly well known in the family to have good carpentry or manual labor skills, but I can try.

To get to Canete we took a number of buses. And although I will give Francisco all of the credit for the hard work we did in Canete, I will blame him for one thing - we left Lima at the worst possible time - 7:30pm, the height of rush hour... at the point in the day when you climb into a hot, smelly, damp, and smoggy bus... when your personal space has been invaded and demolished to the point of complete helplessness. If you're a Seinfeld fan, remember the "Close Talker" character and multiply him times 10.
I'm talking about a situation in which you're no longer lucky if you find a seat. No, the people sitting are the people feeling the most discomfort - If the bus arrives at their destination, they don't have enough time to stand up and wade through the crowd of people to get off before the bus has moved onto the next stop. I would definitely compare it to those puzzle-like games that have 8 pieces for 9 spots, one of which is missing, and you have to move the pieces around in a certain order to make the picture. "Wait, you go there, then I go there, then you sir... you go over there, then I climb over your left arm, then you sit there, etc etc". And even worse, if you're sitting down that means that the people who are standing up are at the perfect height to have their butts directly in your face. Trust me, I'm standing up in that situation and I think if you had the choice, you would do the same.

The first couple of buses were simply maneuvering our way through the city. Our second to last bus got us to the main highway - Panamericana. We were literally dropped off on the side of the busiest highway in Peru, at the busiest time of the day. It was not a comforting feeling just standing on the side of the highway waiting for our next ride to come. Francisco saw our bus, which to me looked exactly like all of the others, but he somehow knew this one went south to Canete and the others did not (the Peruvian sixth sense that I have yet to acquire). Luckily, it wasn't too crowded and had two vacant seats for the hour drive from Lima to Canete. When we arrived to Canete Francisco and I stayed the night at a dormitory building inside of a small trade and farming college. It wasn't too bad.

The work: Well, in short, we built little houses for people - Pre-fabricated houses that we simply had to put together safely and securely. The one problem I had was the lack of efficient tools. Nails, hammers, screws, screw-drivers, and possibly a modern level. One of the more difficult aspects of building these houses was making a level floor. The landscape is sand... uneven sand, everywhere. However, the guys had thought of a really clever and make-shift way to level everything. (I'm sure this strategy has been around for years, but I had never seen or heard of it before). They had clear plastic water hoses and they got a bucket of water, siphoned the water through the hose until it was almost full of water... then stood up each end of the hose at two corners of the house so that water wasn't flowing out. If the surface of the water at each end of the hose didn't match flush with the floorboard then we knew it wasn't level. (*by doing a quick read online of the Peace Corps book, "Handbook for Building Homes of Earth" I found that this method is called the Water Hose Method. If you can't tell, I wasn't a boy scout).

Well, simple tasks like nailing the walls to the floor and putting on doors and windows were made a little more difficult due to the rusty nails and the weak hammers. But, that is to be expected when doing these types of things. I spent a good hour trying to make the window frames fit into the empty window space because they were 'off' by a few inches.

Below are a few more pictures from the trip.

This one is the old house and most of the new house side by side.



This one is of the other two members on my team putting on the support beams for the roof.


Here is the main street in this little neighborhood with two donkey pulling a cart/platform, which, I assumed was the public transportation system.