The family that I'm staying with is doing aid work on their
own--literally out of their own pockets--funding a school in one of the
rural municipalities right outside of Cusco. It's a place where there
has been a kindergarten and a primary school for 15 years, but until
they began paying teachers to go there, there was only part-time
instruction by a volunteer about 2 or 3 days a week. Now, the kids get
full-time instruction, and although there are occasional problems, the
kids probably will have much better opportunities than they have ever
had before.
These kids, by the way, have got to be the cutest things out there.
Until this morning, I was pretty convinced that our landlord's kids were
the cutest possible little people, but that is manifestly not the case.
Peruvian campesino kids are cuter than any gringo kids I've ever seen,
and even cuter, I think, than Guatemalan kids.
Among other things, we played games like "pull the white guy's funny
moustache" and "garbage train," which means the first person grabs on to
the back of the gringo's shirt and we make train noises while performing
a congo line-like dance and picking up garbage off the ground. In
reality, lots of train noises and not much garbage picking-up, but we
made a couple passes, which the kids liked anyways.
Fed them breakfast (bread) and lunch (bananas), because a lot of their
families are too poor to provide them with three meals.
I would be lying, by the way, if I took credit for any of this, except
for having excellent facial hair. My homestay family here is doing all
this stuff.
Between playing with the kids, I had a chance to talk to the community
secretary about local forest politics. According to her, they do a
little bit of reforestation, though they don't get any help from the
municipality or the province, and they only receive subsidized saplings
(not free) for planting from the central government. Even though, they
don't have any trouble with deforestation, she says, because they have a
good system for taking care of people who violate rules regarding
cutting trees. They ostracize them from the community socially and
exclude them from any community decision-making.
So nobody breaks the rules.
Fabulous. This is just the sort of thing I was looking for (but didn't
find) in Guatemala.
Got to go back there and find out more.
I also met with the provincial environmental bureaucrat. He didn't give
me a lot of information (like most municipal bureaucrats), but there is
one interesting thing going on in the province. They seem to be
starting a replanting program as part of a carbon-sequestration project
for which they will receive income. This is an incentive that I don't
think anyone has connected with our research before! Want to find out
more about that as well. Is it real, or is it just some bureaucrat's
pipe dream?
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