random

This is a Peruvian hairliess dog (they do have a little hair, like pigs). They resemble large rats, they are very ugly, expecially the ones without uniform skin color. Wealthy people usually have them and people like them because they have a higher body temperature than most dogs so they are warmer to cuddle with.

This is the "lechero" or milkman. The two containers on the back of the motorcycles are milk. I watched him ladel two liters of milk into a pitcher for the lady in the house and then drive off. When I took the picture, the two Peruvian guys asked why I took it. I explained to them that I thought it was interesting and explained in the US, milkmen delivered bottled milk from trucks. The Peruvians laughed and for the rest of the afternoon, they made fun of me by pointing out people doing ordinary daily activities and said in Spanish: "Paul, photo...interesting" and then laughed about it.

To the left, Manuel, one of the church workers, is buying turkeys, chickens and ducks to deliver to families. They are paid for by their sponsor families. The livestock are alive with their feet tied. Goats, sheep and pigs are also bought this way. Families can either slaughter them for food or raise them for offspring, eggs and milk.

On the right is a used shoulder mounted rocket launcher for sale in an army surplus store in Cuenca, Ecuacor..

This is a picture of some of the church workers eating lunch at El Barbarita, a traditional restauraunt in one of the poor, outlying neighborhoods of Piura. Notice the bottle of water hanging from the ceiling. It is supposed to keep flys away! How does it do this? Well, if you look through a clear plastic bottle of water, everything looks distorted, right? Well, if a fly sees another fly through the bottle of water, the distortion makes the other fly look very large. So, both flies think that there is a very large fly nearby. Now, I am not familair with the latest findings in fly psychology, I must have missed the issue of National Geographic or something, but apparently small flies are afraid of large flies, so both flies get scared and fly away. I�d like to meet the snake oil salesman who sold them the bottles! One time I told Ginet, the "chika" on the left, that there were too many flies and they needed to change the water in the bottle. Ginet told the waitress that I�d said that and the waitress scowled at me..

For you nerdy, engineer types like myself, this is a picture of our water heating shower head. Most buildings here are plumbed for cold water only. The cheapest way to get hot water in the shower, about $20, is to buy one of these. It has an electric coil in it that uses 3400 watts on low and 5400 watts on high, which makes me kind of nervious every time I reach up to turn in on or off with the water running. It didn�t come with a power cord attached, so I taped the hell out of the splice when I put one on. Unfortunatly, we have very low water pressure because the water comes from a small tank on top of the apartment (the city lines are only pressurized a few hours a day), so even on low, it is usually too hot to stand under. And, once a week or so, the water just stops for 3-5 minutes in the middle of my shower, I don�t know why. Of course, when this happens, I am always covered head to toe in soap so I just have to stand and wait for it to come back on! That�s just one of the little annoyances that you learn to laugh at when you live here.

These little mosoleums are put along the roadside by family members of the people that die in car accidents on the highways, just like the little crosses on the side of the highways in the U.S. Some of these are quite elaborate with tile and paint and statues of Jesus or Mary. Since they obviously last a long time, you see lots of them along the highways. There are probably 40 or 50 on the highway to Piata, 50 miles from Piura.

I guess Veronica didn�t want to waste time going to get an actual ladder. I saw this, pulled out my camera and said to them that they were using a "Peruvian ladder". They were laughing at that when I took the picture.

Fun with Spanish!

There have been a few times when my inability to speak and understand spanish well has put me in embarrasing situations. One time I was talking to some young daughters of one of the church workers. One of the girls, who was about 6, was telling me all of the words she knew in English. After she told me she knew the word "chicken", I told her that the chicken in Danish was "cooling" (we had a Danish foreign exchange student when I was a kid who taught me a few words in Danish). I didn�t know that "cooling" sounds a lot like the word for "ass" in spanish and she thought I had said that. An adult Peruvian who was present explained it to her but she didn� buy the explaination. So she ran around that day telling everyone that "the American said a bad word!"

Another time I bought a gift for a little girl in the orphanage for her birthday. I knew that the church had wrapping paper but the church workers who knew where it was were not around at the time. So, I asked someone else and they pointed me to the womens sewing group who wraps lots of presents for the church to give out. They were meeting at the church at the time. I spoke with one of the ladies outside the door of the meeting room, explaining to her in my best Tarzan spanish that I had a gift and I needed paper and I made a wrapping motion with my hand around the bag with the gift in it since I didn�t know the verb for wrap. She took me inside and went to the leader of the group and said something to her. The leader had a microphone as they had just finished praying The Rosary. The leader motioned for me to come to the front of the group. When I got there she handed me the microphone. I asked why she handed me the microphone and she said so I could speak to the group and they could hear me. I asked what she wanted me to say. When she rattled off something in Spanish, I understood that they thought I had a gift for their group! So I had to explain that I was just looking for wrapping paper and that the gift was for a little girl and everybody laughed...at me or with me, I�m not sure which.

Random things I�ve seen or done that Americans might fnd interesting.

When I was on an evalgelistic mission to Trigal, Peru, I saw three guys wearing these hats. I put this one on (althought it didn�t fit my head so it is setting on top of my head) for a picture. It is the skin and antlers of an actual deer. It is not religious or anything, just something these guys had made. There was a fiesta going on at the time in Trigal and they were wearing them while drinking ca�aza, the local alcohol made from sugar cane.

Is that Bambi on my head?

What does it cost to live in Piura?

Here are the costs of a few local items in Piura:
Apartment (which may not include all the amenities that an apartment in the U.S. would have: $180/mon.
Water and Electric bill: $30/mon.
Taxi ride (to anywhere in town) 60 cents-90 cents
Gasoline: $3.28/gallon
To purchase a new taxi: $2,200
Coke or bag of Doritos: 60 cents
Peruvain soft drink or snack: 30 cents
Dinner for 2: $5-$6
Dinner for 2 in a nice restaurant: $20-$30
Beer (24 oz.) $1.25
Movie: $2.50, matinee: $1.50
Coke and popcorn at the movie theater: $1.50
Grocieries of South American products: 30%-50% of price of U.S. products in the U.S.
Private university tuition: $100/month
Anything made in the US and exported to Peru: Same price as in the U.S. or more.

So, living in a third world country can be a pretty sweet deal if you have an American salary, but people here aren�t driving Mercedes because they are saving so much money, from what I understand, salaries here are usually on 10%-30% of salaries for the same jobs (teachers, engineers, lawyers, doctors) in the U.S. Wages for uneducated people are significantly less than that. The average annual income is about $1200/yr.

Meet my pet rooster Franky!

Yes, I owned a rooster for a day. It was given to me when I became a Parino de Pelo (Godfather of Hair) for a little boy near Trigal, Peru. You can read about that experience at the end of my Evangelistic mission to Trigal section. In this culture, people frequently give gifts, particularly to foreigners who come to help them. Many poor people don�t have money to buy gifts, they only have animals, so it is not unusual for someone to give an animal. My parents recieve a turkey every year from one of the families they have adopted. Most of the people here don�t understand that an American just doesn�t really have a use for a live animal. No place to keep it, no desire to kill, defeather and slaughter it. The supermarket is so much easier. Unfortunately, it is rude to not accept a gift here, so we just usually give animals to someone that doesn�t know the person or who gave it to us. Or we give it to the cook at the church who uses it for a meal for the workers. After naming Frankie after a guy on our mission, I gave him to a woman on a bus on the ride home. Her family has probably eaten him by now.

If you don�t like gross stuff, don�t read this. While in Trigal, I saw a traditional horse "race" which ended with a rider grabbing a live rooster by the feet and parading around the race track. Afterwards, he let another rider grab it�s wings and they pulled opposite directions until they ripped the wings out of the live rooster. I was quite a distance from it. This picture is of the second rider holding up the wings after the deed was done. I didn�t ask why they did it, but they were celebrating some religious feast day and it might have been a traditional part of that.

Hello, ASPCA?

More than a little wooden cross.

Earthquake!

At 2:00 am on Tuesday, August 23rd, I woke up because my bed was shaking for about 3 seconds. It was too long to be the result of an explosion so I figured it had to be either an earthquake or I just drempt it and woke up. The next day, someone asked me if I had felt the earthquake! So, that was pretty cool, my first earthquake! We don`t get those in Oklahoma. It was a little one, 4.8 on the Richter scale but the epicenter was only 35 miles from Piura so I could feel it.