It's been six weeks now that I've been at Pisco Sin Fronteras. I love it here. Every day I am doing something new and exciting, or meeting someone new and exciting. Of course it's very sad when friends leave... you wonder if you'll ever see them again. But amazingly, more awesome people come every day. I can't complain a bit!Not long after I started learning to make bio-diesel here, the guy who was teaching me left. So I took over as bio-diesel manager. In this project I've worked on making safety guides, editing our bio-diesel manual, writing the trouble-shooting guide and fixing other odds and ends. I also get to drive out to Paracas where there are hotels like Hilton and I pick up their used vegetable oil to make bio-diesel. We use the bio-diesel to run our work truck (on b100 - pure bio-diesel - not a blend) and we also loan it to the fishermen nearby who will pay us for it when their catch comes in around June. In the long term, I hope to help streamline the process, find more good oil sources, and ready PSF for bio-diesel production for other customers. It's a bit tough to do this stuff without knowing Spanish well, but I do get help from other volunteers here.I also have started a bio-diesel class here. There are many volunteers here who want to learn how to make bio-diesel. Thing is, when I make it I really don't need a lot of help, so other volunteers are usually out on site working when I make a batch. I had my first class last week, which I feel went well, but could have gone better. Now that I know what kinds of questions people were asking, I can do more research and be better prepared for the next one. I was shocked at how many people showed up - there were probably 30 people watching! I was hoping for a smaller class, where we could just all fit inside the bio-shack and just talk about how things worked. Maybe next time (fingers crossed).
It's been such a busy, exciting week I haven't had time to write my blog! Okay, so it's been a week and a half, but go easy on me, the internet's been down for a couple of days.I flew into Peru and stayed the night in Lima before taking the four-hour bus ride down to Pisco. I was a bit worried as we drove through sand dunes and desolate desert villages. I was right to be worried. Pisco is a desert town. I'm used to this, sure, but I've never been in a desert that's so barren. They have a few trees and cactus planted about, but this town makes Mesa seem like a rain forest.
I went straight to the casa de voluntarios and headquarters of Pisco Sin Fronteras (PSF). I got set up in a hostel-style room with three other girls, nicknamed the Powder Room. I live on the top of a creaky wooden bunk bed and sleep on a mattress made of hay. I tried to soften it a bit by sleeping on top of a leftover sleeping bag, thin camping mat, and my fuzzy blanket. It helps slightly, but my limbs still fall asleep often because there's no cushioning to give them room when I lay on my side. I have actually made my lower bunk-mate think there's an earthquake going on when I've climbed down from my bed. There's a beam above my head that is where I need to take cover under if I can't get out of the house and an earthquake happens. I'm actually really excited for an earthquake to happen, just so I can feel what that feels like, but I really hope it doesn't happen when I'm up in my bunk bed!Every morning we get up for breakfast at about 7:30. It's usually oatmeal, fruit salad, scrambled eggs with veggies, rolls with jam, and tea. Sometimes the volunteers who choose to make breakfast will change it up (we got pancakes last week and they were GREAT), but it's generally this. At 8:30, we must be dressed for the day and ready to go, and at that time we gather outside for the morning meeting. The morning meeting serves as a platform for announcements, job placement, and hellos and goodbyes from volunteers who seem to be coming and going everyday. All the jobs are listed on a white board and people volunteer to clean various parts of the house, make dinner or breakfast, or go to a job site. Many people go to the same job site the whole time because they like the family or just get really invested in the work they're doing. Jobs include helping out at the ludoteca (like a free, voluntary school for kids who aren't at public school), helping build houses or pour concrete slabs, work on the earth-bag construction community center, gathering scrap wood from the gigantic metal factory and de-nailing it, or admin type jobs (I think you have to apply for those).
My first day I helped make dinner. This is an all-day job! First we spent some time picking up the ingredients at the market. The market is a huge maze of stalls with people selling everything from toys to fresh chicken feet to underwear. We had to go to multiple little stalls to get our veggies, cheese, spices, chicken, and oil. Back at the house we chopped veggies (after soaking them in bleach water) and fried up eggplant and chicken to make eggplant and chicken parmeasan. There's always a head count at the morning meeting to see how many hippies and monsters we have (vegetarians and non) so the cooks know how much of what to cook. I LOVE this! There are usually quite a few vegetarians too, though many who come to South America take up meat again because it's so difficult to eat here otherwise. I personally have started eating eggs again since we have them almost daily at breakfast, and I've been picking meat out of dishes often because it's either that or starve (and I turn into the Hulk when I'm hungry).
The next day I went to the largest steel factory in Peru, Aceros Arequipa. There, past the factory and through dunes, is a slab of concrete with piles of scrap wood and pallets. The company lets us sift through those and some old tarps and take what we can use, then trucks it back to the wood yard we use across the street from the volunteer house. This job doesn't take all day, but it is quite hard. I was looking forward to the early day, but when we got back, we were recruited to help out with a concrete pour. This is tough and takes many people - people to shovel gravel and sand into the mixer, to gather water, and to pour buckets into wooden troughs to make foundations and columns in buildings we make. Not incredibly fun.
Over my first weekend I went beach camping with about twenty other volunteers. We borrowed some poles, rope, and tarps to make one long tent to sleep in. It was very beautiful - a nice change of scenery from the sad, dusty desolation of Pisco. We had a campfire at night and stayed up drinking, then relaxed the next day, making a big sand castle and also catching crabs and mussels for dinner. While gathering crabs we found lots of little blue and purple crabs under the rocks which were very pretty! Also, walking along the rocky shore, a pod of dolphins dropped by to check us out! It was amazing!
The start of my second work-week was a very snotty, sniffly one. And just at the end of the week, when my sniffles were subsiding, I got the dreaded "Pisco belly." People generally just get an upset stomach and get dehydrated here, most likely from the poor water quality and eating foods that may have been washed or grown in it. People say there's fecal matter in the water because of the earthquake and the lack of a decent sewage system. We boil water for at least ten minutes before using it to cook, and all dishes and vegetables get at least a minute in water with a bit of bleach in it. But most of us still get Pisco belly. I didn't work Friday because of it and got to learn about the joys of delicious re-hydration salts. Yum!The week was cool though because I got to work on the earth-bag community center, then finally on the bio-diesel system. We ran my first batch this weekend. Lots of little issues and things to fix! The methanol and lye solution that we mix with filtered veggie oil tends to crystallize in the pipes and block up the works, so we had a bit of cleaning to do due to that. Last night we mixed the meth oxide with the hot veggie oil and then let it settle overnight. Today, we have to dump the remainder, glycerol, and send the newly made bio-diesel into a series of water washes. The oil sits on top of water and the grit and crap settles into the water. Then it has to go to dry in another tank before it's done. But first we have to test samples of it to make sure most of the glycerol has been separated out.
Days we work hard and nights we sit around a camp fire and drink beer and eat cake (bought from the "cake lady" around the corner who has cakes, beer, water, and can do our laundry).
