Earlier I asked the question "what does a gringo have to do with the urbanization of southern Peru?" And before I answer that question, I'd like to show some ways in which lower class Peruvians have gone about helping themselves without the gold and golden intentions of foreigners.



In order to save money on food, the wives of an entire community will go into the city and knock on the doors of rich people asking for any leftover groceries. With these groceries, they make enough food for the entire community for one day, selling each meal to themselves for 30 cents. With the money collected for the meals, they go into the market and buy food for the next day, and continue this indefinitely, thereby setting up a communal kitchen.



For the week that a certain group of wives do the cooking, their families do not have to pay for the meals, and each week the cooking duty rotates to a new set of wives, and they keep track of this with a kitchen roster.



Another way in which the Peruvians are helping themselves is through what's called a "Wawa Wasi," which in Quetchua means "Child House."



Inside a Wawa Wasi you will have one woman



watching over the kids of the community while their parents go to work.



Lastly, Peruvians help themselves by taking advantage of the fact that thousands of gringos pour into their cities on the way to Machu Picchu or some other local attraction. They all have family back home, and they all feel obligated to buy little trinkets to affirm how much of a world traveler they are.



So aside from buying trinkets, how can gringos help? The answer to this question is complicated. To begin with, I'd like to make a distinction between two different kinds of "help." The first is relief, which is the most common kind of help foreigners like to give. This comes in the form of money, clothing, food, medical treatment, etc. For a rich gringo with more souvenir money in their pocket than what a lower class Peruvian makes in a month, it only makes sense that this kind of help should occur. Ultimately, however, relief is like a temporary bandaid placed on a festering wound. The second and much more rare form of help is development, which is an attempt at dealing with problems more systemically. The Peace Corps, for instance, tries to focus almost entirely on this form of help. It is rare because it requires a large investment of time. It takes the form of education (like sex education in AIDS-torn Africa), training (like showing Peruvians how to purify their water by leaving a bottle of water in the sun all day), microfinancing, etc. Development is the kind of help we would be interested in. One idea we had was to set up a kind of standard for trinket stores so that the customer can be assured that a percentage of the profit is going toward microfinancing. With these finances, we hope to empower Peruvians to open more communal kitchens and Wawa Wasis. We are open to more ideas.

My next post will be about evangelism. Why in the world would we evangelize among a predominantly Catholic society?