Pisco Sin Fronteras

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On August 15, 2007, Peru experienced an earthquake which devastated the town of Pisco and the nearby areas. More than 2 years later, people are still cleaning up the mess. Several volunteer organizations have worked in the area helping to restore the infrastructure. One such organization, Pisco Sin Fronteras, was started by a local man, Howard, and his sister Carolina. They rely heavily on travellers, such as Eva and I, who are willing to give up some time from their travels to work in Pisco. Some of their volunteers have relevant trades; others (like us) come with little useful experience. We volunteered with Pisco Sin Fronterras from Nov. 16th - Nov. 23rd. When we left Lima for Pisco, we did not know too much more about the situation than the information in this paragraph. Since we worked on different projects each day, and had different experiences, we will be tag-teaming a little bit in this entry.

Monday, Nov. 16th - George

Heading to Pisco by bus on the Panamerican highway, I could not help but think of the movie Mad Max. Looking out my window at the passing scenery, it was easy to believe the apocalypse happened yesterday. I have always been attracted to the relatively green desert in eastern Washington, but this desert was barren of life. It was nothing but sand - grey, black and sickly yellow sand - just plain depressing. We came to a crossroad where the bus stopped in front of a gas station. Our bus continued south to the town of Inca, while we departed and took a taxi east towards Pisco.

Over two years after the earthquake, Pisco was still a wreck. Of course, that was the point of us even being there. There was plenty of new construction, but there were also the remains of many buildings that had been destroyed, in whole or part. Other buildings still stood, but were seriously damaged. People were living in buildings that did not look safe. Strangest of these were buildings in which the second floor was occupied, even though the first floor was uninhabitable. The roads were unpaved, dusty, bumpy, and cluttered with piles of material - bricks and fill for new construction as well as debris and trash left from the buildings that had fallen down.

We turned down a side road and found the white and light blue sign in front of the PSF headquarters. We knocked and were received by Jysae, an energetic young British woman who, at that time at least, was a big part of keeping PSF running. Jysae took a few minutes to brief us on the place and what next week would be like.

¨Travelling is the perpetual difference between what you expect and what you get,¨ so says Hugh Tompson in his book, The White Rock. In other words, nothing can subsitute for seeing a place for yourself. That still rings true today, even when we can research a place to death from our laptops. Prior to coming here, I had read another blog from another former PSF volunteer. A few minutes after arriving and I wasn´t sure we had gone to the same Pisco. He wrote that the weather was very hot. It was not that hot the whole time we were there, and the nights were a little chilly. He also wrote about the mosquitoes, although they weren´t much of a factor while we where there. He wrote about all the dirt and sand in Pisco, and how it invariably gets tracked into the residences and bathrooms. On this one point we agreed.

That first morning we quickly learned of a another problem that was neither mentioned in the guy´s blog or the PSF website. One result of the earthquake was that Pisco´s sewer system broke. Tap water is trouble in many places in South America, but in Pisco it is pure poison. At any one time, up to 15% of the PSF volunteers were suffering from stomach problems. Everyone who stayed long enough had their turn. We had signed up for a week in the diarrhea capital of Peru.

The work crews had already left around nine that morning. We were sent to the kitchen to help Claire from Melbourne with dinner preparations. The food at PSF, both before and during our stay, was good and healthy, a remarkable accomplishment given the state of the water, and given that like all other work, the cooking was done by volunteers who came from just about anywhere. Claire had devoted much of her time in the last few months in the kitchen, and was given a lot of credit for the good food. Alas, she left during our week there, and I only hope they´ve kept the food up. That day we helped peel potatoes and peppers for a sheperd´s pie, and apples for a crisp being prepared by a Frank from Yorkshire. Frank was a switch-hitter. As I was to later observe, Frank was one of the best men on the work crews (I think he had professional construction experience), but he had fondness for kitchen duty as well.

Later in the day, the work crews returned and the picnic tables in the eating area were filled. We shared the sherperd´s pie and crisp with about forty other people from everywhere in the free world. The one happy commonality was that they all spoke English, the only language I know. I learned names and listened to their stories - where they had come from, how long they were travelling, what they did in PSF, and what they ´really were´ back home. Alas, there were too many new people, and the stories were more memorable than the names. You meet a guy from Leeds, say, and he´s a nurse, and he´s been here six months even though he came for a week. He´s traveling to Ecuador and it was cool meeting him, but whether he´s John or Harry you can´t recall. After supper, we enjoyed a delicious chocolate cake with caramel prepared by the famous Pisco cake lady in honour of one of the volunteer´s birthday.

That night Eva and I turned in early. They´d given us the token couple´s room, the Tea Room, so called because the owner of the building stores her tea sets and several ceramics in cabinets along the walls. Eva took the bottom bunk and I took the top. The cold drove me down to Eva´s bunk for warmth, where we would be fighting each for space for the next five days.


Tuesday, Nov. 17th - Wednesday, Nov. 18th - Eva

I did not get a good night sleep that first night in Pisco, with the cold of the night and George hogging most of the twin bunk. I woke up to the sound of the toilet and the shower, as the Tea Room was directly adjacent to the bathroom with the good shower. We could hear (and unfortunately smell) everything in that bathroom. Being the one with the good shower, the floor was constantly covered in mud as most people living in the volunteer house would use that shower directly after their work. It was a bit unbearable at times and George was nice enough to volunteer to clean that particular bathroom - sometimes more than once a day.

Tuesday was our first day of work. I signed up for ¨Anna´s House,¨ which I was told needed walls put up. Anna was a young single mother with a one-year-old, who little did I know at the time of sign-up was quite the monster-child. At the time, she was living in a small area - ¨slum¨ might be a more fitting term - where she and all her neighbors live in a 100-square foot space (spaced right next to each other) with dirt floors, bamboo mats for walls, and plastic tarps for a ceiling. Anna had covered her bamboo-mat walls with paper-maché to keep out the wind through the holes in the bamboo mats. The only building materials she could scavenge were a some large cardboard boards and packing crates, for which her new walls were built with by the volunteers a few days ago. The new walls would be part of the ¨addition¨ or extension which would essentially be enclosing what is now her front yard.

That day, when we got to Anna´s house, we soon realized that the walls couldn´t go up right away, as we didn´t have the structural poles for the walls, and she only had 2 out of the 3 additional walls needed for the extension. Anna, however, needed another door built for the extenstion, which we did with the scrap pieces of crate boards, 2x4´s, and large piece of cardboard/particleboard that she had scavenged. Sounded easy enough, right? Well... only if you have the right tools and materials, none of which we had.

We returned to PSF to get hammers and saws, but the handsaws were not in good shape and we only had a single hammer left. The crate wood was also full of nails. So it took us a good amount of time to get most of the nails out of the wood, saw them and the particleboard to the correct size, and to nail everything together. Luckily for us, Anna is a terrific cook and she made us a wonderful lunch by the time we finished her one door.

After lunch that afternoon, she had another project for us. Her front yard was a bit lower than the dirt floor in her house and she would like it to be raised a bit so that the water won´t flow into the house once the walls are put up. Makes sense. Except what she found was a pile of dirt down the street, who nobody has yet claimed, mixed with bits of rock, concrete, and lots of garbage. She claimed that it was mostly ¨tierra¨, earth, but there really was quite a bit of garbage including small pieces of broken glass. But what can we do when that was the only material we could get? The good thing was that she asked a guy with a dumptruck to pick up the pile of dirt (plus stuff) and put it right in front of her place - actually the pile wound up between her place and her neighbor´s, which her neighbor wasn´t too happy with.

The rest of the day and the day following consisted of removing garbage, concrete, and rocks from the dirt pile, shovelling dirt into the wheelbarrow, removing the pieces of glass so that her son won´t get hurt, and pouring it on her front yard to raise the floor level. That and keeping 1-year-old George from killing himself with our extra tools and anything else dangerous he could get his hands on. It was tough work and I had a hard time breathing in all the dirt and just the physical all-day shoveling, but by the end of the second day, the job was done.

Aaron, who was the head of the project (and is a Peace Corp volunteer at Pisco), wanted to do a cement pour to give Anna a cement floor so that George wouldn´t get into the dirt, which still may have bits of glass embedded in it (and still smelled a bit of garbage). He lobbied for some money from PSF and was able to complete that project in the next few days to help out Anna. Within another week or two, after we had left PSF, the rest of the walls went up and Anna now has a more decent home for her and her son. I was very glad of that.


Tuesday, Nov. 17th - George

I signed up for the concrete pour on our first day of work. Before we left for the work site, I was given a job - to collect bricks that were not too damaged from the piles of rubble all around PSF headquarters. Now the bricks were not used as construction materials (they were later used to support wooden beams containing liquid cement), but at the time I did´t know what the bricks were for - and still a strange start to my construction career. Our truck arrived and our work crew piled in the back with the cement mixer in tow. Our work site was in the of village Tupac Amaru, about 20 minutes from our base in Pisco. Driving through the streets, we got the odd look from the locals and an occasional wave. Touchingly, we were cheered by a group of professional workers putting in a new brick building. I wondered what their bosses in the construction industry thought of us, whether some might have lent a hand to PSF. I later learned that the initial response of some material supply companies to the earthquake was to jack up their prices.

Tupac Amaru was a government-created town, built after the earthquake. It was really a refugee town, except the residents were all citizens of the host country. Still, it was prettier and cleaner than Pisco. The ground was made of fine yellow sand, not dirt, and it didn´t have all the rubble. The houses had tin roofs, and walls made of a bamboo, which went up green but turned grey over time. The walls were still green on our client´s house. They had a cement floor in one small front room, but in the rest of their house the floor was yellow sand. They wanted to get their small kids off of the sand and onto a concrete floor - that was our job. Looking around, I wondered who else in the community had a real floor. PSF was not big enough to meet the community's housing needs in a systemic way. People had to apply for help from PSF on an individual basis and generally had to provide the building materials themselves.

Our group of eight was supervised by two PSF veterans, Lizzie and Dave. Dave oversaw the laying of liquid cement on the floor, while Lizzie supervised the cement mixing. Overall we were quite a motley crew. Some of us had relevant experience, but most, like myself, were more used to desk jobs. Still I was impressed by the enthusiasm shown by everyone on the job that day and all gave an honest effort. All day we had trouble with the cement mixer. We eventually resorted to mixing cement by hand in our wheelbarrows, which was tough and much slower than machine mixing. We got only one room done that day, less than half the job. Dave took extra time making sure our floor was smooth, and we were about an hour late getting back to Pisco, but in time for dinner.


Wednesday, Nov. 18th - George

Everyone on cement pour yesterday returned to see the job through. We rented a new cement mixer which ran fine throughout the day. I was part of the ¨barrow brigade.¨ When a new batch of cement was ready, brigade members would take turns holding a wheelbarrow under the mixer - turning our heads so none of the liquid cement splashed in eyes or mouth - and then we wheel it into the back rooms of the house where Dave directed its distribution. Our entrance to the house was at a right angle to that used by the family, and with various obstructions in the entrance way, so we had to be very careful to not to run into any of the wheel-high children coming out of the family entrance. Things went smoothly that day with the working cement mixer, and we had time for lunch and to play with the kids. The job was near completion by end of the work day.

We returned to headquarters for BBQ hamburgers over hot coals in a fire pit, marshmallow roasting, and a sing-along with guitars, lyrics, and some pretty good singers. During the sing-along, a bottle of ´Something Special´ whiskey made the rounds. Then another bottle went around, and another - up to five or six bottles. I had a bit to drink, but not too much, at least I didn´t think so. I was feeling fine when Eva and I turned in later that night.


Thursday, Nov. 19th - George

They say too much of a good thing is not a good thing. Well, I can tell you that too much of ´Something Special´ is not so special at all. I went to bed the previous night with two hamburgers, potato salad, marshmallows, a beer, some wine, and several shots of ´Something Special´ whiskey in me, and my stomach was very uncomfortable. I tossed and turned the whole night, listening to people use the bathroom next to our room. At about 4:15 am I went to the bathroom myself and hurled. I got a large piece of onion stuck between my upper lip and my two front teeth. When I finished in the bathroom, I returned to the ´Tea Room´ and checked the time: 4:30 am - time to make breakfast. Eva and I had volunteered to cook breakfast that morning. In a separate agreement between two of us, I agreed to get up first to get the water boiled. Quietly I walked over to the second compound with the kitchen. I woke Pete, who was sleeping there, but he was nice enough to pretend he was already getting up.

I got out two large pots and started boiling water for tea and washing. I started to clean the kitchen which was still a bit messy from the night before. Most of the dishes were washed last night, but there were a couple of scattered plates with leftover hamburgers. There was one large pile of leftover potato salad on the counter. The kitchen smelled of onions and potato salad. I was overwhelmed but managed to get to a bathroom to hurl again. Eva showed up on time to take over in the kitchen. I went back to the other compound to fetch Frank, who had agreed to take me to the market to pick up the fruit and eggs.

I found Frank´s room and gave him a gentle poke. Immediately he bolted upright, said something fierce, and fell to sleep again. I was unsure how to proceed - he´s a big man. I risked a second poke. He sat up just as quick, this time fully cognizant of himself and the morning´s mission. Within minutes we were off to the market. The market was similar to others I had seen in South and Central America, with a hodge-podge of any home products you could need, plenty of ocal fruit, vegetables, and of course, lots and lots of meat - piles of dead chickens laying on the counter, great sides of pig and cow hanging on rope, dripping with blood. I trailed behind Frank, experiencing all the market smells as we searched for our wares.

We returned to the kitchen and Frank was kind enough to join us in getting breakfast ready. Eva did the eggs (scrambled) while Frank and I peeled the fruit. Now I would have felt guilty missing a day´s work because of a self-induced illness; and since I had a little breakfast in me and I was feeling a bit better, I signed for work at Miguel´s house.

Miguel already had a concrete floor. He wanted some walls around it. Our job that day was to break up the perimeter of the floor and dig a trench around it so that support beams could be placed for new walls. I was again doing barrow work, removing the dirt taken out from the trench. I could barely walk on my own, and walking with wheelbarrow full of dirt and stone was harder still. Two hours in, I had to quit and leave sick. I was in danger of falling in the trench or dropping my load on someone´s leg.

I hailed a tuk-tuk, the common means of travel in Pisco. It was a light, three-wheeled vehicle with no suspension, covered with a nylon frame. I closed my eyes as I was jostled through the dirty, bumpy streets back to PSF headquarters. I was about halfway home when I knew I wouldn´t make it. I remembered the word for stop (pare), but I didn´t dare opened my mouth. I tapped on the guy´s shoulder but he didn´t understand. Fortunately his window was open (some tuk-tuks don´t have windows), so breakfast came out over the side of his tuk-tuk, rather than on the inside. I should have said I am sorry (disculpe), instead I told him lo siento which is closer to meaning ¨I have pity on you¨. Between the two of us, I was the more pitiable. He gave me a towel to wipe down his tuk-tuk, and I paid him an extra good tip.

I spent the rest of the day in bed. Eva came and confirmed that I had a temperature. I actually felt better about that. No way you could get a fever from drinking too much, so clearly something else besides ´Something Special´ was going on. Maybe this wasn´t my fault after all. I slept great through the night and woke up feeling like $10 million dollars the next day.


Friday, Nov. 20th - George

Feeling better, I returned to Miguel´s house. Except for me, the work crew was completely new - between illness, reassignments, and departures there was often a rapid turnover on projects. Yesterday, the team had managed to dig the trench on the perimeter of the floor. Today we were to fill it in with rocks and new cement, fixing the support beams for the new walls in place. We were working with a local builder or ´maestro´ and his two sons. While the volunteers were all wearing gloves and boots, the locals were both barefoot and barehanded. I had the sick thought that I could crush a man´s foot with one dropped rock. What would happen then? Would kind of care would the guy get? Would I man up and pay for any expenses, even if it meant cancelling the rest of our trip? Would he ever return to normal? One dropped rock could nix any good I had done in this town.

We finished a little early with no incidents. Time for a shower. Of course I had a shower every day since working here, but today´s was to be a good one since I anticipated not working and being unusually clean through the weekend. The idea of a shower is that you come out cleaner than you came in. Simple, but not so easy in PSF. The bathroom floor was usually dirty. The shower floor may not only be dirty, but may also contain a standing pool of shower water from the six people who showered before you. The towel rack is small. Some clothes may be hung from the pipes, but you had to be very careful that they don´t fall to the floor or into the open waste basket. As elsewhere in South America, everyone´s toilet paper goes into the waste basket. My work clothes included a pair of jean shorts and a large orange scarf, like something owned by your mother´s aunt, both borrowed from PSF supplies. The scarf was used to keep up the shorts that were a little big on me. When I showered, I used the scarf to tie the shorts to a pipe, and stuffed the rest of my clothes into the shorts. Depending on the time of day, you could get a hot shower, a cold shower, or no shower at all. We ran out of water 3 out of our 6 nights in the PSF compound. That day, I was in early and enjoyed a good hot shower.


Thursday, Nov. 19th - Friday, Nov. 20th - Eva

After shoveling dirt for two days with my entire body still aching, I decided that I wanted a change in my duties as a volunteer. Not only am I not so good at shoveling dirt, I felt a bit out of place at times working on a construction-related labor-intensive project with me not being able to physically provide as much hard labor as the two other male volunteers. So Thursday morning, I volunteered for ¨Beach Cleanup,¨ (with Viru, Claire, and Nicola) which was actually quite a different job than the name implied.

For the last several months, many volunteers including PSF members and those from other local organizations have been working hard to restore an area of wetland next to the beach. It was once completely littered with garbage and other debris, making it unsuitable for the birds and other animals that live there or migrate through. After cleaning up the actual wetlands, PSF continued to help clear a few trails that run through the area, but were completely overgrown with grass and weeds. At the time I came along, the trail clearing was completely done and the organization was getting ready for their big fiesta for the upcoming Sunday to reopen the new restored wetlands to the public. To prepare for the event, they needed some last minute preparations done such as putting signs up (No throwing garbage, Don´t moleste the animals and birds, etc), painting the partial wall and rocks lining the trail white, and the main welcome sign for the wetlands still needed to be finished painting. Viru helped finish placing the signs - which involved digging holes for cement blocks for the signposts, Claire helped with painting the wall, and Nicola and I worked on the main sign.

When I started, the sign read ¨Bienvenidos al Projecto Piloto¨which is ¨Welcome to the pilot project.¨ It still needed ¨Recuperacion a los Humadelales de los Pisco-Playa¨ (meaning ¨of the recovery of the wetlands of Pisco Beach¨). Victor, the man in charge of the project, put me in charge of cutting out stencils for the rest of the letters. I was working with Nicola, an Irish girl living in San Francisco who was an artist by profession. She had worked on painting the sign the two days prior and had beautifully painted the logos of the contributing organizations. She was putting finishing touches on the logos and starting on painting the letters for the rest of the sign.

Nicola and I worked very well together. At one point, we looked at the rest of the letters we had and concluded that they wouldn´t all fit onto the sign in an artistic manner. I came up with the idea of shrinking the ¨del los¨between ¨recuperacion¨and ¨humaledales¨so that they would fit on one line and look good. Nicola agreed and painted the ¨de los¨by freehand beautifully. We were using stencils that I was cutting out for the rest of the letters. Unfortunately, the green paint we used for the lettering was think, goopy, and difficult to paint with, especially under the hot sun. The paint bled underneath the cardboard stencil and we would need to correct the lettering with the white background paint the next day after it dried. We both agreed that it would have been much faster just to draw in the letters and paint them freehand than to bother with the stenciling. So for the last line, we pieced together letters from stencils, traced them, and painted it in - which turned out perfectly fine without the bleeding.

Unfortunately Nicola had to leave the next morning in order to catch her flight out of Lima, so I returned the next day (Friday) to painting the sign and putting finishing touches on all the lettering. Victor was estatic with our work at the end and called it ¨f***ing bueno!¨ I was happy I could contribute - painting signs was one skill I actually had and enjoyed doing!

We all finished our work early that last day and made our way home on the scenic route via the now-cleared trail and across the beach. Thousands of Franklin gulls could be seen migrating through this area around dusk, stopping by the wetlands to feed and roost for the night. The restored wetlands were there for all to enjoy - the community and the wildlife - and now our sign will be hung there as a permanent part of Pisco!


Saturday, Nov. 21th - George

On Saturday, Eva and I volunteered to teach English as part of the Spanish-English Intercambio Exchange for a few hours in the morning. We put table and chairs out on the street, right beside the second PSF compound, waiting for people to come and talk to us in English. Things were slow, so I went back to the first compound to help with cleanup, which took place every Saturday. I found a back room where people had let garbage pile up, and made a start of cleaning it. I brought out about six bags of garbage. A family started picking through the garbage as I was taking it out. Of course I had seen people pick through garbage on city streets before, but I´d never seen people claim my ´home garbage´ like this. They gave me shy smiles. I didn´t know what to do but smile back and call off the PSF dogs who were barking at them.

Eva and I had one student. He was a souvenir shop owner with some rudimentary English. Business had been bad ever since the earthquake, and he needed any advantage he could create for himself. Eva did most of the talking while I made tea and searched for teaching materials in the PSF compound. Our student had been in the church in the main square when the earthquake started. He ran from the church before it collapsed, killing other parishoners that remained. He showed us the scars on his ankles and legs that will remain through his life.

That afternoon PSF was involved in a town parade. All volunteers were encouraged to attend. I never quite knew how or why we where involved in a march, but most people seemed pretty excited about it. We assembled at headquarters to get our faces painted with ¨PSF¨ one cheek (face) and the Peru flag on the other. Then we took tuk-tuks to the main square. We waited on the square for some minutes before we were directed to a nearby school to wait for the start of the parade.

There were about four other groups besides us. They were school or youth groups. There was one youth on a long set of stilts. After about twenty minutes or so we were assembled into our groups and sent marching back to the square. The first part of the route was not blocked from normal street traffic, and we shared the street with cars and tuk-tuks. At least some of them were nice and gave us a friendly beep. The press showed up, and a young lady stuck a mic in face and asked me a rapid fire question in Spanish. I had not a sweet clue. I saw her camera man just over her shoulder, and wondered if we were live. I panicked.

¨No hablar espanol,´ I shouted. Very poor grammar (its ¨No hablo espanol¨), but somehow effective, and she left me alone straight away. Later I realized my ¨press¨ were just a couple of kids, covering the parade for their youth group or for a school project. I still wonder if they are laughing at my interview.

We arrived at the main square. Here there were cops blocking the streets off, and we marched twice around the square. At first I enjoyed the novelty of participating in a parade in a foreign country - its not something I had ever planned or anticipated when I left home. However my enthusiasm soon waned. The ´audience´ was not too impressed with us. I think most people just happened to be in the square at the same time. It didn´t even seem that most of the kid´s parents were there. We stopped marching and occupied the main square. Speeches were made, and somehow prizes were given out. Later some of the kids performed cultural dances. The dances were actually very good, and I was impressed with the choreography. The girls held cheek aching smiles from start to finish. PSF departed before the speeches and dances were through (it was going to be a long night), and we went back to headquarters for a little party with pizza, beer, and punch.


Saturday, Nov. 21th - Eva

After 5 nights sleeping in the Tea Room, I was completely fed up with the lack of sleep, the lack of room to sleep, and the vast amount of dust, dirt, and filth that filled our clothes, the air, and the bathroom. We also don´t have a door, just a hanging sheet. My breaking point was being woken up in the middle of the night by the cat climbing on top of the cabinets, and in the morning by Gringo, the PSF German Shephard, who decided to put his nose me in my face and completely freaking me out when I opened my eyes.

So after our Spanish-English Intercambio and before the parade, we moved our things to a hostel around the corner, one block away. Two of the volunteers were leaving and we got their room - the only one with a warm electric shower! We also found out later that several other volunteers were also in the hostel for the same reason - they had had enough of the dorms and shared housing. It was such a nice change to finally having a room (and a bathroom) to ourselves again that we slept decently well for the rest of our time in Pisco.


Monday, Nov. 23th - George

I signed up to work on the French bathrooms. I was interested in the project for two reasons 1) the name - why was PSF building anything so fancy sounding as French bathrooms and 2) the manager - the project was headed by English Pete, currently the oldest member of the PSF community and one of the more interesting people there. In spite of the name the french bathrooms were not some frou-frou addition to the home of one of Pisco´s elite. They were a set of community bathrooms being built in a small town nearby, where people were currently using a river for their bathroom needs. The project was being financed by a French organization, hence the name.

In morning meetings Pete talked about the project with such assurance I figured he must have been a professional plumber back home. I discovered he was no such thing. He had no plumbing experience at all before joining PSF. That day we were to meet the real plumber, a local maestro hired by the French people, for new instructions. We were joined by Mark and Sam who had also been working on the project for a while. They discussed the plans with the maestro for over an hour (Mark is fluent in Spanish), and I impressed by the technical knowledge that everyone had gained through their involvement with the project. They were excited when the maestro showed them a trick for fitting one pipe over another by warming a pipe end with a lighter, thereby expanding it.

After the maestro left we picked up with the work, fitting pipes into the brick structures that had already been built for the showers and toilets. It was a fairly light work day, especially for me as the newbie. I felt a little guilty for leaving Eva and Frank in the kitchen doing a tougher job. Pete showed me around a little after lunch. It was a pretty little town. The river looked beautiful but it stank. At the end of the day we played a little football (soccer) with some locals before the taxi brought us back to Pisco.


Epilogue

Pisco Sin Fronterras was one of the toughest, but most rewarding stops on our trip. We would strongly encourage the willing and able-bodied to stop by and give them a hand. There's no requirement for a long term commitment. Their daily fees are very cheap are go directly to food and lodging. We spent far less money there than we have going elsewhere as tourists. At the same time do not go there just for cheap food and board. You are supposed to be working. Also they have a zero tolerance drug policy and they mean it. Finally DO NOT DRINK THE WATER.

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Photos

Pisco City Hall
Dome is still cracked from the earthquake.

Sunset over the PSF house
The PSF work house is only the shack on the left... not the nice one with the car on the corner.

Jake and Aaron with Anna
PSF put in a floor and walls for Anna and her 1-year-old son George. Eva worked on the project her first 2 days, helping build a door and elevating the floor level.

Comments

[andres]

Help
Hy,thanks for helping everybody the pisco people. Im from Peru, now live in new York ., you have very nice idea in reconstruyed the city.