fog, wi-fi and Inca Kola

This morning we visited our first project in Peru. However, that was not the first thing that happened today. The first thing was I woke at 2am convinced it was actually 8am and time to get up, which of course it was, in England... When it finally got light and I looked out the window it was raining - well, a sort of hard drizzle permanently suspended in the air. So that dispels another myth, that it never rains in Lima...

We set off in the rain, Edwin driving, Carlos from CEPES which is the organisation in charge of the project, myself, Graham, and Marianella from the CIIR office here in Lima. Drove through a bleak industrial landscape north of the city with huge refineries whose sole purpose appeared to be to pollute the already devastated landscape, a sort of dirty grey desert crawling with half-built houses and crude shacks. It seems impossible that people can live in this desparate environment. Maybe it was the effect of the fog which lay over everything like a dirty white blanket, suffocating all the hope out of the place. But these ramshackle homes are built on crumbling hillsides or, quite simply, on desert. No water, no vegetation, nothing, just sand and dirt. How can people live here? Apparently these are places that people just come back to to sleep, then over time - maybe over a whole generation - they maybe get electricity, a bit of permanence, a community. People come to Lima, they have to live somewhere, so they build their homes on this blasted landscape that God forgot, pinned there by poverty and fog for nine months of the year, and searing heat for the other three months.

We started to climb up a range of hills and the fog got so dense you could literally see nothing. I thought I had perhaps passed into another dimension, a sort of purgatory where I believed I was alive but in fact there was no evidence of life, indeed there was a possibility that the entire planet had ceased to exist, or that we had been sucked into some sort of white hole. I had the sensation of ascending then descending, and then suddenly I could see a sign. I believe it said something like "Welcome to Huaral. Mosquitoes, no thank you."

Here, fortunately, there were signs of life. Green stuff growing in fields. People! We drove into the town of Huaral, to a house where we were met by Jaime Torres, the CIIR development worker. Jaime is a young Colombian who gave up a prestigious job in Bogota to come to a rural community to teach farmers to use computers. If that sounds stupid, it´s not. It´s really amazing. There are 13,000 farms in the district and they all rely on water distributed through a complex system of irrigation channels. The water is controlled by the local irrigation council, which needs to know how much water to send where, and when. The irrigation council has to apply to the government to get the water, so it needs to know how much water it needs, and when. The farmers need to know which crops to plant and when, so that they can get the best prices, and be sure they will have enough water for the crops to grow. Just thinking about it makes my brain hurt, but Jaime´s brain not only understands it, he´s devised a database system to collate all the information, and a wireless internet system to make it accessible to the farmers and the irrigation council. I can´t begin here to describe how it works because I fear that this will need a wisdom and understanding beyond my simple powers right now (it being late at night when I am writing this) - which is not to say that the system is not a thing of clarity and perfection. All I can say right now is that Jaime and Carlos and colleagues have expanded the frontiers of technical knowledge, faced problems head on, solved them creatively, and created a beautiful sustainable system that provides a simple, workable solution to a problem faced by an entire district of farms. It´s kind of like one of those enlarged pictures of snowflakes: it´s complex, simple and beautiful, all at one time. I was very impressed.

Then we went to lunch and drank Inca Kola, which for those who don´t know it is yellow, and tastes of bubble gum. According to Jaime it´s addictive, after you have tried it a few times you cannot face a meal without that yellow nectar. He drank several gallons of it.


After lunch we visited one of the internet telecentres where the farmers get to use the computers. It was in a small room in a small village. I saw some small boys sitting beside a roadside stall selling flowers, and suggested to Graham that here was a photo opportunity. Then I thought we should maybe buy some flowers. Of course the boys weren´t selling the flowers, they were just hanging around waiting for some passing gringo to come and take their picture. There hadn´t been a stupid Englishman along for years, suddenly there were two! Some people just can´t believe their luck. So one of the boys went off and got the flower lady, and (since at that moment I had only a 100 dollar note in my pocket) Marianella bought flowers for everybody she could think of, and then some other people as well. They were extremely nice flowers. They grow in the desert, fields and fields of them where some people, their heads in a fog, may see only the white mist of hopelessness. But these flowers are bright, they are yellow and orange and pink and red and yellow.