I meant to think of a title but never did

As my time in Samne draws to a close, I’m very excited to get back to Princeton and share our findings with the rest of the team. For me, our trip started out with the rude awakening that a landfill would not be an appropriate first project for this community. The interest of the members of Samne was simply elsewhere; as of right now, throwing their trash down the ravine on one side of town puts the garbage out of sight and out of mind, and few people see the potential benefits of a better waste management system. After talking to some of the other volunteers in the area, it seems like this attitude towards waste disposal is a consistent problem all over the country, and changing this mindset, while a worthy project, will require a much stronger relationship with the people of Samne.

As the head of the design team, I had spent many hours of this past year preparing for the construction of a landfill, and even though we knew that our first project was uncertain, it was still disorienting to have to stop the design process in its tracks and start again from square one. Not knowing exactly what project we would be working on with the community definitely made me nervous. So I was very glad when we began asking around town for other potential projects and got a number of good suggestions. One that immediately jumped out was bringing a potable water system to the casserillo of La Pitajaya, a section of Samne that lies off in the mountains a ways and lacks much of the infrastructure present in the main section of town (electricity and potable water for starters).

On Monday, after a ride in the back of a pick-up truck that started out as exhilarating and ended up a little too death-defying for my tastes, we ended up in Pitajaya for a meeting with the town. I was immediately impressed by how hard-working, friendly, and intelligent the people were. They are close enough to developed towns and cities to know what amenities they are missing. They know their water isn’t fit to drink, they know they need to boil it in order to avoid getting sick, but for children playing outside and adults working in the hot sun all day, the reality is that this doesn’t always happen. My respect for the road that brought us there (a rocky, 7-foot wide path that seemed to me like an avalanche waiting to happen) immediately skyrocketed after hearing that they had carved that road out of the mountainside by themselves, completely voluntarily, so that their children wouldn’t have to walk all the way to central Samne to go to school. Lucho, the main representative for La Pitajaya, kept us all constantly supplied with apples from his orchard, and I for one left feeling like these would be people I would be happy to work on a project with.

Overall, this trip has been full of great new experiences, and I feel that I must express my gratitude to Samne for all the adventures we’ve had:
- experiencing my first earthquake
- finally getting to ride in the back of a pick-up truck (Peruvian-style)
- taking sewage sample (and posing for pictures) in Tyvek suits
- learning to set off fireworks from a beer bottle using a cigarette
- realizing that Inca Kola really IS better than Coca-Cola

Of course this is but a small, select group of all our exploits. I look forward to returning to Samne in the future and continuing to learn Spanish, get better at soccer, and make more Peruvian friends.