It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt...

...or until people get really, really tired and on the verge of cranky. The fun and games are definitely over. And the problem with the project that Heather and I are doing is that we live across the street (and a tiny little park) from Jenry, so he is at the office from the time he has breakfast till he goes to bed or goes home to spend time with Margarita and Adrian...which is good and bad. We are with him all the time, so it's like we are working all the time. We're constantly working on our projects unless we are running errands or having breakfast, lunch, or dinner with him and his family. It has left us feeling pretty tired. In fact, it is after 11 here and I think Heather is doing the go-to-bed routine. We still have tons to do and Jenry is in his office blasting Latin rock and working on his end of the month financial statements. We have a big meeting tomorrow with all our microempresarios and so there's a lot to do. Plus, since Heather and I are only here for three weeks total (and two weeks from tomorrow!!!!), there is so much to do all the time.

Yesterday we went and did visits in the morning. We went to visit three families and their small businesses. It was kind of like being on a mission except Heather and I were wearing jeans. We were just dropping by the businesses to see how things were going and to say hello. You cannot believe the poverty. We went to a place called Salaverry. It's an important port for exports in Peru, but even with that, it's basically completely rundown. It seems sort of like a shanty town. The buildings seem sort of thrown together with whatever materials they have--cement, wood, tin, plastic. It's amazing.

We stopped first at the home of an acuña maker. Acuñas are little rectangles that are really similar to peanut brittle. We went to visit the home of the man who makes them. He makes them in a room in his house designated for that purpose, but the whole house is so tiny that it seems sort of strange that it's even a home. It was basically a long dark hallway with a little bit of space off to the side here and there. He was very humble and had served as a bishop. His family was very kind and generous. They gave us each three acuñas to take with us, which was close to all the inventory they had at the time. When we tried to pay them, they wouldn't let us.

After that visit, we stopped by the stand of another business owner. The stand is one of many in a small marketplace. Everyone sells essentially the same thing from stand to stand. Heather and I are supposed to come up with suggestions for each business. We're sort of at a loss with this business, because what we want to tell them is, "Your business sucks and you need to revamp the whole thing because you can't expect to make a profit selling the exact same thing for the exact same price as the ten other stands next to you. You have no competitive advantage." It didn't help either that when we got there, their stand was closed and we had to call them on the cell phone to come open it. Um...sort of hard to make money when you don't open for business. This one is going to be a little difficult to work with.

Our third visit was to the home of a fisherman. He was out fishing. Always a good sign. We decided to walk down to the shore to see if we could find him. He wasn't there, because he was out on the ocean. We couldn't even see him or his boat from the shore. There was a man there offering to give all three of us a ride in his rowboat for five soles, so we went. It was fun to go around the bay and see the other boats up close, to be on the water, to watch Jenry get totally splashed by a wave...but mostly I was struck by how hard this man and so many others work. 5 soles is only about $1.60. You can buy shampoo for 9 soles, so...that's really nothing. It probably took him about 20-30 minutes to row us around. Being Peruvian, he was already dark, but the sun had bronzed him even more, he was thin with taut, defined muscles, and very kind.

After our little excursion to Salaverry, we returned to the main part of Trujillo to have lunch at the Silvas. After lunch, we worked on writing up reports on our morning visits, talked to Jenry about ideas for Eagle Condor, worked on presentation stuff. Heather worked really hard for hours on a presentation with a slideshow of a bunch of the microempresarios. It took forever and we still have more work to do on it.

We also went to the grocery store yesterday and bought a bunch of groceries for dinner so that Margarita could have a break. We made Chinese Chicken Salad and rice crispy treats. The Kellogg's rice crispies here are either chocolate or strawberry or you can used other puffed rice cereal that is vanilla flavored. That's what we went for...not the same. They don't have mandarin oranges here or water chestnuts so we had to leave those out of the salad (they do have ramen noodles if you can believe it). And they have great marshmallows and butter, but the rice crispies...interesting. All in all, it was still a great meal...if we do say so ourselves.

Well, Heather took a bunch of pictures from our visits and excursions yesterday, so I'll let her post those when she gets a chance. She already posted a picture of a little boy from Salaverry. He was so adorable. I gave him a cracker and he just stood there staring at it and us. He finally started eating it. The children here are so cute. I just wish I could stay and play with all of them and love all of them. They have hard lives ahead of them.

Heather and I have talked a lot about how the lives here are all the people know. They don't know any different, but at the same time...it's not an easy life. There's a lot of stress for people to just get by. At our first visit, this man who was once a bishop talked about how he would make 100 or so acuñas a week and then each day he would go into the main part of Trujillo and walk the streets as a street vendor calling out for people to buy his wares. He wouldn't return home until he had earned enough money to buy food for the evening. I don't care if that's all you've ever known. That ain't easy. If Peru has shown us anything, it's that we are ridiculously wealthy...and also that not all puffed rice is created equal.