Peru – Journeys

Engineers Without Borders Trip – Peru 2023

On October 14, 2023 I began the 5-hour descent from the Peruvian high jungle of Villa Rica (a small town known for coffee production and coffee tourism) to the low jungle town of Iscosazín to begin work on our Engineers Without Borders (EWB) water project with the indigenous community of Shiringamazú.

It was a beautiful drive, especially because the road had been serviced earlier in the year. My past three trips to the community (since 2018), I had always arrived feeling like a maraca after a Cuban music festival. This trip was much smoother!

…Except that the car broke down about 40 minutes before arriving. In the dark. In the middle of the jungle. Where there wasn’t cell phone service. After about 15 minutes, a truck passed by and was kind enough to give us a ride and even tow the car the rest of the way in!

Thanks to the kind people in this truck, we were only stranded for less than an hour.

And so I arrived, cognizant of the foreshadowing of all the twists and turns that would probably lie ahead, (not uncommon in any engineering and construction project – especially an international one – and especially in a rural area, deep in the jungle).

I barely had time to thank my lucky stars that I had made it safely, and the next morning I was meeting with our NGO partner and our contractor to review our plans… then driving an hour to conduct a site inspection/assessment… and then detouring to a recently installed well system about 40 minutes away (Chuchurrus) – all while getting caught in the first rainstorm of rainy season!

Caught in the First Rain of the Rainy Season

The site inspection had brought another surprise, making me grateful we packed it in before we met with the community. After hacking our way through the jungle to the spring site, we realized that our plan to capture spring water from this site would not be feasible. Our team had hoped to be able to do a spring capture here after having reviewed more than 10 different possible approaches to bring water to the community. This meant that we would now need to pivot to focusing on the other part of our design and another one of our options: a hand-dug well.

We heard loud claps of thunder as we hiked over to inspect the site we planned for the well and to consider how we would pivot. There was a nearby stream, and we could potentially capture this surface water. However, the treatment system would require maintenance that would be challenging for an already under-resourced community. Rain drops began to fall, and as we were hiking back to the car, the sky opened up and poured on us, as if teasing us about the conundrum of this site: plentiful rainwater during the rainy season but no source of water sufficient to supply the community through the dry season.

Julia and her two kids fetch water from an almost-dry stream in the dry season.

If you’ve been on an EWB trip, you know that the days are packed full – both physically and intellectually challenging, as we travel to an environment we aren’t used to, where we design and implement a technically challenging project – all in the context of a culture and language that we don’t typically work in. And this trip was already checking all of those boxes!

The next day was one of the most important days of any EWB trip – we met with the community leaders. These meetings are especially important because of the nature of EWB work: there is no cell service or internet in the community, so these meetings are our primary communication with the community. That’s right – for most of the year, while we are in the US raising funds and doing technical work for the project, the community doesn’t see us and probably thinks we forgot about them, like they say many NGOs have done in the past.

In this meeting, there was a mix of new leaders and those from the previous year, so it was important to explain who we are and what we were doing. As the meeting went on, some people from the community began to gather around and listen in. With the help of our NGO partner, we explained that we were volunteers, working on this project outside of our normal work and family commitments and that we even have to raise the funds on our own to pay for the project.

That incited multiple leaders (and even some community members) to give moving speeches about the importance of water, especially for the children in the community. They offered to help in any way they could and urged the leaders and other community members to do all they could to help make the water project a success. The community leader pledged to feed and house the workers for free and provide and transport aggregate material to the site for the duration of the project.

Two community members that live in the neighboring sector were so moved that they congratulated us for the work we were doing and offered to help us during the whole week, even though they would not directly benefit from the water system since they live in the neighboring sector. For the rest of the week, they became my core surveying team.

Survey Team: Mario and Alex and our NGO partner, Juan

After returning to town to use internet to consult the EWB team through photos, videos, and whatsapp conversations, we decided to move forward with the hand-dug well and determine if the well could provide enough water to meet the community’s needs. If it didn’t, we could consider other options, such as using the well as a pumping chamber for treated surface water from the stream, digging a well near the river and pumping long distance, or finding a drilling rig that could tap a deep aquifer.

While the contractor led a team of workers to prepare the well site and begin digging, I began the land survey, first with a volunteer, Carlos, and later with Alex and Mario surveying along the road where the water mains will run.

Clearing the well site and starting the well.

Despite the extreme heat from the sun beating down on us all day long, our team maintained good spirits and made good progress. Mario stopped by tiendas (community stores) we passed and always showed up with a donated bottle of water to keep us hydrated. A few people even came out of their houses with drinks for us or invited us in to drink from coconuts.

Carlos and his family invited us in and gave us coconuts to drink.

Since the community had offered to provide food and housing for the workers, we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the “comedor,” a communal restaurant that was an outdoor eating area with a small kitchen area where two women prepared food. Meals were light and consisted mostly of fish (sometimes chicken) – the main protein of the area – and rice.

The “comedor” where we ate all our meals during the week and found shelter from the heat.
From left to right: Alex, Benamin, Juan, Mario, Hugo, Daniel, Elmer, me.

During the week I was able to speak with a couple people about their life without tap water. Dry season is really hard for everyone because they have to go long distances to fetch water, and even then the water sources are contaminated. Carlos told me, “We really suffer for water in the dry season, especially this summer. The water we do have is from spring-fed ponds, but it is contaminated because the animals are there in the ponds when we go get our water – sometimes ducks, chickens – and this affects our health, the health of the whole community.”

I was quite sad to leave the community after we had all worked so hard together and enjoyed each others’ company. Our contractor remained in the community and hired two locals to help with the hand-digging of the well. After about a month and a half, the team encountered an impassable layer of rock, and we had to bring this phase of the digging to a pause. While we wait for the rainy season to pass, we are working hard to raise funds and looking for a company in Peru with a drilling rig that can help us complete well construction after the rainy season in 2024.

Please donate if you can, and please let us know if your company or a business you know would be interested in supporting the community of Shiringamazu! For more information and history about the project, see our EWB Peru Project webpage.

Crossing the Border

As much as I would have loved to stay longer in the paradise of Amantaní, my visa had expired and I had to flee the country (Peru charges a fee for every day you overstay your visa.)

While not unsurprising, crossing the border between Peru and Bolivia was not a smooth process for me because of my expired visa, my very flexible backpackers itinerary, and my US citizenship.

At Peruvian immigration I had to had to jump through a whole series of hoops (including taking a taxi to the bank in a nearby town to pay the fee for overstaying my visa). But they didn’t put me in a detention center or deport me back to the US, so instead of complaining about the inconveniences I’m just thankful that Peru Immigrations is more humane than the US when it comes to visas and immigration.

Bolivian immigrations also gave me a hard time, but that was kind of expected. As a fellow traveler pointed out to me, the American passport is one of the most powerful , or widely accepted, passports in the world. Almost all countries will let us visit with few problems. Meanwhile, if you happen to be born in a North African country, like my traveler friend, she was only able to travel to a handful of countries with her passport (until she moved to France and got a French passport).

Whole US citizens enjoy this travel freedom, the US is one of the countries that restricts entry simply for a person’s country of origin.

Bolivia is one of the countries in the world that has a reciprocity policy for US citizens – since the US makes Bolivians (and most South Americans) pay a high visa application fee and puts strict (and sometimes arbitrarily interpreted) requirements that many people don’t meet so they end up not getting the visa and losing the application fee, without obtaining a visa to travel to the US…Bolivia puts a high fee for US citizens wanting to enter Bolivia. (Unfortunate because many US travelers disagree with the US immigration policy and they are the ones that bear the cost, but I would do the same if I was Bolivia.)

So after paying my fee, changing money, and finally passing Peruvian immigration, I walked down the road to Bolivian immigration, thinking I had my paperwork in order but finding out I was wrong. They hassled me about my itinerary and made me retype it, mostly because I didn’t have hotels reserved in advance since I was on a backpackers plan where I would find a hostal in each place I went. Actually, the real real reason was that they were just following policy…the US hassles Bolivians about entering the US, looking for any reason not to let them in, so they were doing the same.

Interestingly, their attitude towards me changed when I heard them speaking Aymará so I tried to joke with them and throw in some words in Aymará from the cheat sheet that Romulo (my host from Amantaní) had given me.

Maybe it’s that when I tried to connect with them and their culture they realized I wasn’t a stuck up and racist American. Or, maybe an American trying to pronounce words in Aymará was more entertaining than a frustrated and tired American being hassled about being let into the country. Either way, they loosened up, joked with me, accepted my paperwork without further hassle, and let me in the country.

This was a perfect example of how my travels have been like a video game – something I picked up along the way helped me pass to the next level.

When I was staying in the island Amantaní, I enjoyed great conversations with the couple with whom I stayed, including conversations about politics. From Romulo (the husband), I learned about the divide in culture and language between the different sides of the lake Titicaca – the part north of Puno is Quechua-speaking, and south of Puno and into Bolivia is Aymará-speaking.

The day that I had planned to leave the island Amantaní, we got word from a teacher who lives in Puno and travels to the island for the weekdays to teach, that there was going to be a huge protest that would block the main roads between Puno and Bolivia.

The regional governor for the whole region of Puno had just been charged and put in jail for leading protests that destroyed state property a few years back. As the region of Puno is culturally divided between people who speak Quechua and those who speak Aymará, this was the first regional governor that was from the Aymará culture (almost always a Quechua-speaking governor had been elected).

Because of this, many Aymará people were upset with the ruling, believing that it was a political move to oust their leader, and so they would be protesting by blocking the roads hoping to release the governor. (This type of protest, in which the roads are blocked is somewhat common in Peru, and the good thing is that it is usually planned a few days in advance so that people get word and know not to travel those days.)

So along with this history and culture lesson about the Puno region, Romulo showed me a chart that translated a few basic words between Quechua, Aymará, Spanish, and even English, and he told me me take a photo of it.

Little did I know, he was the wizard giving me the magic wand that I would later need to open the door to taking me to the next level of my video game Odyssey – from Peru to Bolivia.

Bonus Round: After finally arriving to the plaza in Copacabana, I was struggling with google maps trying to find my airbnb because there were no street signs. Suddenly, someone calls my name, and it’s one of the guys who worked in the immigration office. A little creepy, yes. I asked myself if he was following me, and I was kind of cautious answering him. But it turned out that he happened to live nearby (it’s a really small town), and he was just being nice and helpful. When we found the place, he wished me a safe journey and left me feeling like that magic wand of connecting with people through their own language had turned obstacles into friends helping me along the way.

Bienvenida a Bolivia! The Bolivian adventure begins! ??

Island Life (Amantaní)

Sometimes we travel long and hard to arrive at our destination. And then sometimes the journey itself is so beautiful and interesting that it is part of the destination.

Getting to Amantaní is one of the latter. The hour-long motorboat ride through the lake was was both fascinating and relaxing at the same time. A vast expanse like the ocean, but calm, with only minuscule waves, passing islands along the way that I had seen from the shore just a day before…and passing the shore that I had been on just the day before, staring out to where I now was in a boat!

When I arrived at the dock, I was greeted by a smiley and warm, short and round woman who introduced herself as Silveria, the wife of Romulo, with whom I had organized the stay. She led me up a steep sidewalk with many stairs along the way, and after just 5 minutes I was huffing and puffing with my 15 kilos of backpacks and just my second day in the altitude. But luckily, we had already arrived!

Their house is located close to the dock, and my room had big windows with an incredible view of the lake!

Just like in Ccotos, in the shade it’s cold and I need my 2-3 layers, but sitting in the sun for a few minutes I could wear just a long-sleeve or sometimes short sleeve t-shirt, so I sat in the sun while Silveria prepared lunch.

Chatting over a delicious lunch of local varieties of potatoes, an assortment of vegetables, and local bread, I learned that Silveria had run from one side of the island to the other in the morning, first helping her step-mom on her farm, then working on her own farm on the other side of the island, and then running to the dock to meet me. She said it took her about 30-45 minutes to run from each side of the island to the other.

Over lunch, we shared stories, getting along so well that we even began sharing about our childhoods and a summary version of our life stories! After a rough childhood, she was very happy to have a peaceful life with a nice house and a nice husband, living a good life without want. She reminded me of a sweet and hospitable southern woman, someone who had grown up in a machista culture and had a rough childhood but had made a better adult life for herself and lived constantly thankful for what she has now, moving and speaking in a manner that was both self conscious and humble, yet confident in its own way.

In Amantaní, similar to Ccotos and the surrounding areas, people’s first language is Quechua because that is what is spoken in the home. I asked if Quechua was taught in school, and the response I got was, “No, everyone knows Quechua so they don’t need to study it in school.” I was told that typically children speak only Quechua until age 5 when they begin going to school, where they start learning Spanish and school is pure Spanish.

It was interesting to me that, while speaking to Silveria, she was quite self conscious of her Spanish, even commenting that my Spanish was better than hers (though as we talked more and became more comfortable talking, her Spanish flowed more and more fluidly.)

In the late afternoon, Silveria walked me up to the path that led to the highest points on the island-two hills close together, each with a sanctuary to Pachamama* and Pachatata, respectively.

She left me and I continued to climb, slowly, step by step…up to 4,200 meters, my lungs wondering where all the oxygen went, and the temperature dropping rapidly. I was surprised as the land and hills began to give way to water on either side (apparently I had forgotten I was on an island).

My plan was to watch the sunset from there, but the clouds rolled in cutting it short. What I did find as I got closer to the sanctuaries was a ton of tourists! (And a ton of local women selling chullos* and sweaters and crafts and souvenirs all along the paths)! The tourists had all come out from hiding wherever they were staying on the island, and everyone had come to watch the sunset up here.

I got a little confused getting back to the house, and as I asked an older man who was walking with a child, he sent the little girl to walk me to the corner where I needed to turn. I found this simple reaction to be so strange and so kind – but very different from most places where everyone is in a hurry and busy with their own things and also worried about sending kids off alone, even for a few blocks.

That night over dinner, speaking with Romulo, I learned that the island is actually quite organized around the home-stay tourism and they usually partner with tour companies who bring in large groups of tourists at a time. The community is divided into 10 communities, and each community rotates being the host of a group of tourists, with each family in the community offering space in their house and meals to the visitors. Each community also has a community center where they perform traditional dances and have a party with the group of tourists. (I had bypassed this system, contacting Romulo directly, and he said this was a much better deal because he directly receives the payment, and they even have a problem with one tour company that never paid the island for hosting a group.)

I was really impressed by how organized the island of 500 families was. They meet every Sunday, first the whole island, and then they break into meetings just for each community. Romulo explained that it was their only way to get news since there wasn’t a radio station on the island just for news about the island (though they do get regional radio stations from Puno and Juliaca).

They also coordinate which communities plant which crops when, and they rotate, making sure the land has time to rest. Because of the population and limited amount of land, the island is not self-sustainable and the crops produced are not enough to feed everyone so they do have to buy food from the mainland in addition to what they produce. Because of this, the money brought by tourism is crucial for the residents.

The night was so quiet and peaceful and the stars so incredible!! And it was cold. I didn’t dare shower and I slept under about 6 heavy blankets. Before going to bed, they told me if I had to use the restroom to use the “pee bucket” under my bed instead of trying to brave the cold and go to the bathroom. I had heard of these “pee buckets” from other Peace Corps volunteers that lived in the mountains, but I had never seen them for myself. (Turns out it was just a plastic tub.)

The next morning I took a stroll along the shore…

And then we all had a crepe-like “pancake” breakfast, learning about each other’s families.

Later, Silveria walked me to another spot on the island that the tourists often like to visit, the Inca’s chair. To walk there, I noticed that she took time to put on a nice shawl, and she also brought along her knitting…and continued to knit as we walked there! (I was highly impressed.)

Everything on the island is somewhat of a climb…at this point I realized that as an island, it’s really just a big hill or mountain jutting out of the middle of the lake, with the middle of the island being the high points and the shore the low points, so you really have to climb to get anywhere unless you are literally just walking along the water.

I really fell in love with the island, with its stone paths connecting the 10 different communities. I saw the island to be filled with with trees, houses and farm plots. There are no vehicles – everyone walks. (Though I did see one motorcycle in the two days I was there.)

The Inca’s chair was a beautiful spot on the beach and I camped out there until lunch, writing, and then returned after lunch to watch the sunset.

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Dinner was delicious and a really great conversation, including Romulo showing me a photo of Silveria and complimenting her to me (with her sitting there in the kitchen) saying what a beautiful wife he had and what a great cook she was. I practiced a few of the Quechua words they had taught me, commenting that the food was delicious and thanking them for it:

“Sumaq micqvi” – delicious food!
“Yoshparasonki” – Thank you!

(My Quechua spelling is surely not correct, but that’s how I remembered to pronounce it.)

Muña- the minty-smelling herb that helps with the altitude and stomach problems. We had fresh muña tea every meal!

Before daylight broke the next morning, I left the warmth of the 6 heavy blankets and headed out to run/walk up to the highest point of the island, the sanctuaries to Pachamama and Pachatata, to watch the sun rise and start the day with some yoga and meditation at 4,000 meters (13,000 feet).

Starting at 3,800m, and climbing to 4,200m (13,000 feet) was not a walk in the park and I had to stop to breathe a few times and also take off some layers, but in about 45 minutes I reached the sanctuary and did a few sun salutations because, well, for obvious reasons.

While I was meditating I heard what sounded like a fan motor off to my left. Then I suddenly heard it in my my right ear, I opened my eyes and was amazed to see a hummingbird (“luli”) floating just one foot from my face, checking me out and whispering (quite loudly) in my ear, with its thousands-of-beats-per-minute wing-flapping motor. After 3 seconds it flew away, but left me feeling like I had just received a message from Pachamama delivered by a Chaski* in the form of a hummingbird.

After breakfast, I had to say goodbye, and I mentioned that I was sad to be leaving because I really felt at home with them and was so thankful for their hospitality, and as I saw their faces light up with genuine happiness, I was really touched to have met such kind people that opened their homes and lives to me for a couple of days!

When I had arrived, I had greeted them with the handshake, hug and air kiss that I was used to in Peru, but awkwardly found that they were expecting only the handshake. Out of habit I accidentally made that mistake twice! But upon leaving, they each reached out for a hug, and I felt a special connection to this family and this beautiful island in the middle of the highest navigable lake in the world.

Famous Footnotes:

*Pachamama – the Incan word for mother earth, which is revered with a god-like respect and reverence

*Chaskis were the Incan messengers that traveled the Incan roads delivering messages throughout the Incan Empire

*Luli – what Silveria called the hummingbird – maybe the Quechua or a local word for the hummingbird. She said it was a sign of good luck for my journey

*Chullo – the warm hat with ear flaps commonly used in the mountains of Peru and Bolivia. I learned from Romulo that if your ear flaps have dangly balls like mine, you can tie the earflaps back when you are eating so they don’t get in the way!