Sounds in Site

I put together a little video blog about the sounds that infiltrate my daily life in Monsefú.  Hope you enjoy!  I'm traveling 6 hours north tomorrow to Máncora, the most touristy beach in Perú, where I will be spending New Years with other volunteer friends.  Happy New Year everybody, can't wait to see what 2012 has in store for us!

Counting My Blessings

First, I would like to start off this blog with a clip from one of my favorite movies of all time, White Christmas.  When I was a little girl, I fell in love with this movie during the Christmas season and ended up watching it year round.  Looking back, I think this movie is where my love for dance started.  This here is my favorite non-dance scene.

(to those viewing this blog post as an email, click on the grey "Perusing PCV" text at the top to view this on the web with the videos).

Like the song says, I am counting my blessings this year.  I had some strong bouts of homesickness, similar to my birthday and Thanksgiving, but overall Christmas has been great here, even with the lack of snow and Christmas sweaters.  But hey, it legitimately RAINED last night, it's a Christmas miracle!  My brother ran out of the house to twirl around in it.  I guess this is like a coastal Peruvian White Christmas?

So, some things about Christmas are the same here, and some are really different.  Christmas trees are common and Santa comes here too, still as a big fat white guy with blue eyes and a huge red coat, even though it's summer and he's called Papa Noel.  But he's not as omnipresent here as he is in the States, it's a lot more about baby Jesus.  And presents aren't as big of a deal as they are in the States.  Kids still get presents, but only one or a few depending on the family (if they can afford any).  Most adults don't exchange presents, although my host family got me an adorable huge teddy bear.  I laughed pretty hard, but thought it was kind of perfect at the same time.  It gets pretty lonely up on the second floor sometimes!

Christmas is celebrated at midnight, centered around two things: 1) the nativity scene and 2) dinner.  Every family, office, etc. has a nativity scene, with the classic Mary and Joseph, 3 wise men, etc. but some also add random animal figurines... chickens, cows, etc.  Earlier this month I was distracted in the local charity's office when I noticed a T-Rex in their nativity scene.  I laughed pretty hard and pointed it out, thinking that someone had put it there as a joke, but the guy I was with didn't get what was funny.  Oh dear.

The nativity scene in the Principal Park of Monsefú... no dinosaurs in this one.

Anyway, my host family's nativity scene was a lot more like that one I grew up with, just a small set of figurines on a table.  But there is one thing that is different here, that the baby Jesus isn't put into the scene until midnight on Christmas Eve.  So my host family joined hands, said Our Father and Hail Mary prayers, and my host mom gave me the honor of placing the baby Jesus into the scene.  Then we passed over to the dinner table and had a beautiful, delicious dinner of turkey, peas, and empanadas.  Everyone was in really great spirits and it is definitely a memory with my host family that I will cherish.

So that's essentially all of the family Christmas activities, along with house visits from other family members and lots of phone calls.  But I still haven't described one of the main parts of Christmas in Peru... CHOCOLATADAS.

The word means "chocolate party" because all the kids who attend receive hot chocolate along with panetón (sweet bread with raisins and fake fruit in it) and probably some garbanzo beans and an empanada.  The hot chocolate part doesn't make a lot of sense because it's summer here, but the tradition must have started a long time ago to imitate some American or European tradition.  There's also usually a lot of dancing and payasos (clowns) to get the kids tired before they give out the food. So the chocolatada involves not only food, but also each kid getting a toy (a little truck or gun for boys, and dolls for girls).  Now, this part is pretty complicated.  A lot of the kids and parents who attend are not shy about trying to hide the toys they have already received in order to get more for themselves or relatives.  For example, if there is a line, the kid or mother will get back in line (or completely ignore the line) and pretend they didn't get anything yet.  Various systems have been created to prevent this, for example only giving presents to kids who have tickets and then ripping up the tickets after the present has been given, but people are really, really, insistent.  I don't know what else I can say about this topic, except that for a poor family here, toys are a big deal and there is a different cultural attitude towards hand-outs, where a lot of people feel very entitled to them, or they feel that they have to fight to get their fair share.  Coming from a different world, it is hard for me to deal with this part of the chocolatadas, when mothers are begging or screaming at me and others to give them more presents.  Of course, for every mother or child that acts shamelessly, there are other mothers and children who quietly wait their turn and tell me honestly if they've already received a present.

To date, I have participated in seven chocolatadas of all shapes and sizes (have an 8th scheduled for the 28th), three of which were more like sit-down dinners for adults (senior citizens, artisans, and ex-combatants in the Battle of 1941 with Ecuador).  The ones for kids ranged from about 40 kids to ... 3,000.  The huge one was organized by the Municipality, and they actually had a pretty interesting system to avoid the double-gifting.

All of the presents and holiday baskets in the Municipality

Panetones take over the Mayor's office

As you'll be able to see in the video below, thousands of people lined up during the chocolatada dancing activities to get a good spot.  After the dancing ended, the doors to the central market were opened just enough to let people in one by one, and with the help of the police, we were able to usher people into various lines around the counters of the market.  It got a little more disorderly once the market started filling up, but the idea was that everyone would be brought into the market, all the doors would be closed,  the toy-and-panetón giving would begin at various stations, and those who had received would be ushered directly out a different door.  One way in, one way out, so that people couldn't get back in line... kind of an enormous fire hazard, considering that the market has been declared structurally unsound, but hey.  It generally worked pretty well, although there were still plenty of people begging and screaming at the doors.  When it was finally over (3 hours later), we realized that the staff and volunteers were stuck inside, because all the doors were occupied with people screaming at the mayor to open the doors and give them presents.  We took to hiding in the back office and once it calmed down enough outside, a staff member slipped out to bring some soda and a few panetones to us.  It turned into a really great memory for me, sitting on a counter, laughing and talking with the mayor and some of the people who have become my friends here.

Some of the staff and volunteers after finishing the enormous chocolatada; Edgard, Jesus, and Bridgette in the middle

Subtracting the stress and chaos that comes with the chocolatadas, I've had a lot of fun helping out at these events.  I generally took the role of body guard to those handing out the presents, since I'm taller and foreign, I guess people listen to me!  Each event was a way for me to share some Christmas time with the people that are important to me here... the artisans, the Municipality staff, the teenage Señorita and Cholo Fexticum, the leader of an outlying town, and the women's committee.  Another favorite memory of this Christmas season was after a dinner in the Municipality, when all the guests left the cumbia music was turned up and the mayor, regidores (like a Board of Directors), and women's committee shared a dance together- it happened to be to my favorite cumbia song, so everyone had a great laugh when I started belting out the words.

Having a great time with the mayor, regidores, and women's comittee

I dearly, dearly miss a lot of things at home during this holiday.  It has been even harder than my birthday or Thanksgiving.  But I am counting my blessings, todas mis bendiciones.  I have the best job in the world, and feel very privileged to be granted such an opportunity to travel, learn, and share.  I have a very colorful host family that teaches me new things every day, and I have grown much closer to my host mom during this Christmas.  I have internet access and am able to stay in touch with family and friends at home.  I have friends in Monsefú who really look out for me and I am finally feeling at home here.  And I am happy, healthy, and safe.  And I feel that I am growing into a much stronger person.

My biggest blessing of all is you, my family and friends.  I want to sincerely thank you for your support in whatever way it has been, through email, gChat, Skype, Facebook, blog comments, care packages, or prayers.  To my parents, godparents, aunts, uncle, and other family and friends, I hope you know that it makes so much of a difference to know that my loved ones are thinking about me at home.  I am very blessed to have such wonderful family and friends.  MERRY CHRISTMAS and bring it on, 2012!!

Dust, Appearances, and Womanhood

As another volunteer said in her blog, it is becoming harder and harder to know what to write about, because many aspects of my life feel so normal and uninteresting, or I forget what might be interesting to someone in the United States.  So here are three topics have almost nothing to do with each other, except that they are all topics very basic to my life here:

This is how much dust I picked up in my somewhat-weekly
room sweep.

Dust.  

My life here is a dusty one.  I live in eternal, rainless summer (except for the rare el Niño years).  My trip to Chachapoyas was the first time I had seen and heard real rain in 5 months.  So in Monsefú, between the desert-like climate, the proximity to the ocean, and the constant piles of construction materials in the streets (rocks, cement mix, sand), there are a lot of particles whipping around in the air, finding its way into everything.  My eyes, my nose, my mouth, my electronics, my food, etc.  My family sweeps the inside of the house twice a day, attempting to battle Mother Nature who wants to place a brown film over every surface.  When I am outside of the house, I have learned to walk with my eyes almost always half-squinted, less a wind picks up and smacks me in the face with 100-year old dust from the deconstructed adobe house I am passing.  My sensitive, eczema-ravaged skin is not happy with me; I've developed some itchy, dry patches and every few weeks, my eyelids rebel against the abuse and swell up.  The floor of my room is uneven, unfinished cement so I seem to generate more dust that I am get rid of when I attempt to clean.  In order to clean a dusty area, you first have to splash water all over the place to keep from creating unbreathable clouds when you sweep.  Many people also try to help the situation by throwing their dirty water outside on the street or other dusty areas.  Opinions are divided on whether this actually improves the situation or not, since we are then always subject to walk through dirty puddles.

Appearances.

People observe and comment on many aspects of each other's appearances.  And the comments are very far from what the US considers politically correct.  There's a totally different treatment of the topic of weight here, so people are completely honest with each other when it appears that someone has lost or gained weight.  I actually appreciate this part of the culture, because considering the amount of rice I am eating on a daily basis, I want to know if my host family thinks I've gained significant weight.  But some of the comments are just jaw-dropping.  For example, one of my favorite people in Monsefú is a 25-year old woman named Evelyn, who has a beautiful singing voice and is very involved in the Catholic Church.  She also happens to be very significantly overweight.  A few months back, I went to a sit-down party for the priest's birthday.  At the end, everyone grabbed the balloons off the wall to pop with their hands, in a symphony of loud cracks (Peruvians love explosions and loud noises, a topic for another day).  When all the balloons were gone, another church-helper yelled, "Wait, there's one more balloon to pop!! and ran over to grab Evelyn around the waist.  I couldn't really read Evelyn's expression to see if she enjoyed the joke or not, but everyone else found this hilarious, including Padre Alfonso.  

Here are Chino and Nacho, two popular Venezuelan
Reggaeton singers.  Chino is on the right.

Race is also treated very differently here.  Someone whose eyes are slightly slanted is nicknamed "Chino," even if he is clearly Peruvian with no resemblance to an Asian.  My host dad, who you may remember from the video is fairly dark-skinned, considers himself black and any time that someone makes a comment about something being dark or black, he says "Sin insultas!" to jokingly imply that we are insulting him.  In both childhood and adulthood his nickname has been Negro.  He and my host brother also make some pretty shocking commentary while watching black soccer players, saying things like "Ohmigod, where did he go?? He's so dark that I can only see his eyes and teeth, haha!"

I've had a few conversations with Peruvians about how these topics are treated differently in the United States, especially about the Chino thing... I say "you know, not all Asian people are Chinese, so shouldn't we say Asiático?" and the response I have gotten multiple times is "Oh, no, I don't call him Chino because he looks Chinese, but because his eyes are Chino" (while pulling on the corners of their eyes!!)  I then of course cringe and say that gesture is considered really offensive in the United States, which just gets a response of laughter, "Really?! Well it's not here!"

Members of one of the artisan associations in town

Womanhood.

In most families and place in the provinces of Peru, gender roles are very clearly defined.  This of course means that women generally do all of the cooking and cleaning in the house.  As a result, I can't plan any meeting with artisans until 4pm or after, because all of the artisans that have families are too busy preparing and cleaning up lunch before that.  It also means that many artisan groups depend on having soltera (single) women members, who can go to fairs and other events that involve traveling.  Some husbands blatantly won't let their wives travel for fairs, or married women will say that they just "can't" leave the house, because what would their family do for lunch?

Being a young gringa woman here definitely attracts plenty of unwanted attention, and I am not just talking about piropos (cat-calls).  The harassment here is a whole other level than I have experienced in Spain or elsewhere- it involves a lot of whistling but also HISSING, LIP-SMACKING, and disgusting sexual faces and comments.  It's all completely cowardly, because they do it once your back is turned or right in the moment you are passing them, so that it's too late to react.  I try my best to preempt the harassment, by making direct eye contact without a hint of a smile and giving a very stern "Buenos días." That usually works, at least in my site.

A mototaxi stop is right in front of my house, so everytime I cross the street I have to pass a group of 4-6 young guys, who used to make lots of comments at me.  I knew this was not something I could accept for two years, so one day I had had enough, and I turned back around and asked them each what their names were.  They all hid their faces and only told me their nicknames, and I told them that I'm living here and I find it really disrespectful when they make noises at me like that.  We had a brief conversation about how they didn't mean to be disrespectful and just wanted to tell me how beautiful I am.  Right.  But it's been a bit better since then.  They still giggle when I pass, but they don't say anything to make me mad.

The worst of the sexual faces, sounds, and comments seem to happen in Chiclayo.  I can usually tolerate it or at least choke down my desire chase them down and punch them in the face, but every once in a while I lose it, like this weekend.  First it was the old man (around 70), smacking his mouth at me and making comments as I passed him on the street.  It really made my skin crawl, so I was already bottling that up when I crossed through a park with 3 other girl volunteers, and a 16ish year old boy on a bench starting commenting on how delicious we were.  I whipped around to face him and he just about jumped out of his pants.  He bolted off the bench and started walking away before realized how cowardly that looked, so he turned back around and scratched his head, looking quite unsure of himself.  I ask him how old he was (no answer), and told him that was really rude, and he mumbled an apology.  I felt great, until we passed back through the park, and from the other end of the park, he and two friends were whistling at us and screaming "HELLO! HELLO!"  You just can't win.  Sometimes (most times) confronting it makes it worse.

I've become much more acutely aware of my female-ness here in Peru, because of the ways I  and other women are treated.  I've been indirectly told that I muddled in men's affairs.  I've also been told that women are more domestically abusive than men.  Dealing with these kind of things as a Peruvian woman  (not to mention the actual physical and verbal domestic abuse that is rampant) explains why a lot of independent women are so fierce about their feminism here... the younger generations of girls are growing up in (hopefully) a world that gives them more power to express their opinions and decide their own futures, but it's still a very unequal situation they live in.  For my experience here, the positive outcome is that I am learning to embrace or understand the girl-power sort of stuff that I avoided in the United States.


I meant to write about a fourth topic in this post, religion, but I think this has turned out to be long enough already, so I'll save that for later.  I hope my readers don't find this blog too depressing or negative, while these aren't super fun parts of my daily life, these things don't get me down that much because I've grown accustomed to them.  I also think Peru is also making my sense of humor much more dark and sarcastic... I'll try to be a little more cheery in my Christmas post!  Miss you, family and friends.

Community Integration, Stage 1: Complete.

I'm starting to think that Peace Corps service is just one big series of "Moments of Truth."  We used the phrase "moment of truth" in Pre-Service Training during our Field-Based week, it's the way I felt in my first meeting with the artisans, and it's how I felt last Tuesday, when I presented my Community Diagnostic.

Every Peace Corps Volunteer is required to complete said Diagnostic, which is basically a way of organizing everything you have learned about your community in your first 3 months, based on surveys, interviews, and other activities with as many different groups as you can get to know.  I am super sick of describing it so I'll leave it at that.  The last two weeks I've been promoting this meeting on the radio and handing out (on foot, with a little bit of help) 70 official invitations to the artisan associations, directors of the high schools and Instituto, and other authorities and friends.  The people I expected to show up did, and the others did not; overall, I had about 40 people there, including the mayor and 2 other Peace Corps Volunteers.

The basic idea of the presentation is to give the community an opportunity to reflect on their current issues and how they can be solved.  I presented some of my ideas, most of which have been brought up by monsefuanos before (which is a good thing!).  What I mean is that there was already a lot of community support for these ideas, and they just haven't been achieved (for a number of political or whatever other kind of reasons).  My basic recommendations and things I will be working towards are:

• Formation of an Artisan Council (called a COLOFAR, could receive funding from the Municipality) to represent and organize programming for all associated and independent artisans
• Formation of a Tourism Committee, that represents the artisans, restaurants, recreation centers, and people involved in FEXTICUM (our big cultural festival every July)
• Computer classes for artisans, assisting them in internet promotion & researching new designs
• Productive activities with young people: summer camps, career and university panels, making sure all the hours of the school day are used to the fullest
• The Municipality needs to take big steps to promote tourism/culture/artisanry in Monsefú before it's too late (before all the artisans disappear and other sites gain notoriety)... I said that my dream would be to see this building below, the old Municipality building, turned into a "living culture" museum and open artisan workshop, where the artisans can work, sell, and give trainings.

The old Municipality building is the one with balconies, just to the left of the "Mercado Central Monsefú"

When I said this, the artisans bust into applause, which was a really cool moment for me (As you might have guessed, they have wanted this for a long time).  At the end of the presentation, the mayor gave a few words, and she went into more details about her plans for the museum/"living culture" workshop.  She basically said she is ready to support this project too and that a sufficient budget is already set aside, but the issue is the contract with the restaurant that rents out the bottom (You can see the open door in the picture).  She said we will work on putting together a list of signatures of everyone who supports this project, so that we might be able to convince the renter to break the contract sooner.  Anyway, overall this was very encouraging.  Rita (our mayor) stayed after to talk with one of the most educated and smart people in Monsefú, a young professor friend of mine, more about the museum, and hopefully his awesome ideas and my willingness to help will combine to make this idea a reality!

At the beginning when I was explaining Peace Corps, I used the quote from President Kennedy's Inauguration, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."  I brought it full circle at the end of the meeting, and asked everyone to write down one goal for this year, one thing they can do for the benefit of Monsefú.  They wrote these goals on papers in the shapes of flowers, because Monsefú is known as the "Eternal City of Flowers"... and everyone always jokes "and where are the flowers?" because our town is pretty desert-ish like the rest of the coast.  Well... here are the flowers!  Some of the people were more into it than others, but hey, it looks pretty.

The weeks leading up to this presentation were exhausting, but they were also some of the best yet that I've had in site.  Things felt markedly different as I was preparing for this presentation- mostly notably, people were stepping up (in small ways) to help me... I don't want to sound too negative here but basically it is often like pulling teeth to get anything out of my Municipality, as people would rather pelotearme (punt me around like a soccer ball) than actually do work.  But it seems that my time spent in the Tourism and Public Relations office has finally paid off, as they actively helped set up my presentation (computer, projector, speakers) without me asking.  

I finally felt like I had people watching out for me this week.  Especially two people, Saida and Jackie.  Saida is the Tourism person in the Municipality who has verrry slowly warmed up to me, but it finally feels like we are friends.  A while back when we were handing out invitations together she slipped her arm in mine to walk linked together (seemingly all Peruvian girl/women friends do this), and this past week we sat in her office and has a really good chat about motherhood... which I know so much about, right?  Anyway, it was great.  

And Jackie, oh Jackie.  This woman fell from heaven about a month ago.  She has an artisan craft store that was seemingly never open because she was traveling, so we only met recently, and ohhh what I have been missing.  She is almost single-handedly setting up a Christmas Dinner that all associated and independent artisans are invited to, which I think is the most amazing thing we could do to bring unity to the different groups.  She is super Christian so has a very powerful way of talking about unity, sharing, love, etc. and over the last few weeks of planning has become a great friend to me.  She invited me to go to her Protestant church last Sunday and then to eat lunch with her sister's family, which was really special.  More to come about the church stuff in a later post.  And she went out of her way to help me solve my chair-quantity-crisis the day and hours before my presentation.

Anyway, a number of conversations and events this past week made me feel like I've finally gained a significant level of trust and understanding with some people.  I didn't really realize before what I was missing, but now that I have it, it feels so much better.  I could definitely use a lot more help and support, but for now- Community Integration, Stage 1: Complete.

Education in Peru

Today, I read an article in Peru's El Comercio newspaper that named the Top 10 Challenges to Sustainable in Development, as identified by a government-sponsored conference.  The list made some good points, mostly focused on business and trade.  But to me, there was a HUGE piece missing from the picture- education.

I've always known how important education is, but my life in Peru is teaching me this lesson in a whole new way.  The challenges of education here are so sad that it makes me want to work in the area of Peru's education policy after Peace Corps.  I'll attempt to paint a picture of the education system and opportunities here in Peru, from what I know or have observed.  As a disclaimer, I am not an expert in the educational system here so I hope I don't misrepresent any facts, and I don't intend to make any blanket statements about all schools in Peru- there are definitely schools that meet and surpass expectations, but unfortunately there are many schools that do not.

Grade school is divided into primaria (6 grades) and secundaria (5 grades).  In my town like many others, a student can either attended in the morning (8am-1pm) or the afternoon (1:30-6:30pm) so they are supposedly in school for 5 hours a day.  By the time a student finishes secundaria, they might be anywhere between 15 and 18 years old.  Just like in the States, families can choose from schools that are nacional (public) or particular (private).  In many of the public schools, especially in rural areas, the demonstrated learning is tragically low.  Part of the problem is that teachers aren't paid enough, but I also don't think there are enough checks on teacher performance.  It's not uncommon for a teacher to simply not show up to class, and forget it when the school anniversary is going on- a public school in my town just had its 50th anniversary, and the way this educational institution celebrated was by replacing classes with cleaning competitions, soccer and volleyball tournaments, and simply canceling classes.  It seems like every time I go into a school, the students are on some sort of "break."  When teachers do teach, it is very based on rote memorization- the teacher writes something on the board, the students write it down, memorize it, and spit it back up on a test.  From what I have seen (and heard), there are hardly ever opportunities for critical thinking.  When I try to have students figure something out for themselves (what should you type into Google to find what you are looking for?) the teachers jump in and give them the answers.  Students are accustomed to copy-pasting entire research projects from the internet or books- and this habit continues all the way through university.  While I was visiting one of the best universities in Chiclayo, my professor friend explained that the flyer I was just handed was offering the services of a thesis "tutor," someone who will write your entire thesis for you.

Peruvian students aren't lazy, they just aren't taught how to learn or think creatively.  So they lean on the crutches of the internet and memorization to scrape by.  One thing I have been really impressed by is Peruvian students' public speaking ability- most presentations are purely memorized, but I've had a few opportunities to see students speak off-the-cuff in the Municipality, and they were incredibly articulate.  

The Peruvian youth seems to really want to be educated- a large proportion of the kids in Monsefú have parents who didn't graduate from secundaria (and sometimes primaria), and check out the results of this survey question I asked as part of my community diagnostic:

The survey was applied to 124 secondary students in my town, 81 of which attend public school and most of which were in their "senior" year.  The question asks "What level of education do you think you are going to complete?"

Almost all of the surveyed students said that they think they are going to an institute (like a 2-year technical college), university, or master's program.  And the free-response section regarding the motivations for their choice really pulls at your heart strings... all of these answers are from public school students:

(University): "Because I have the ability to make something of my life." (Female, 17 yrs.)

(Institute): "Because I want to study so that my parents feel proud of me and also because with a career I would be able to survive" (Male, 18 yrs.)

(Master's): "To be someone useful to society" (Male, 16 yrs.)

(University): "It's the thing I want most in life, and anything can be achieved with effort" (Female, 17 yrs.)

The other big theme in the answers was "because my parents can afford it."  And many of the kids who chose "institute" as their anticipated level of education said they would want to go to college if their parents could afford it (which they can't).  I hope that all of these kids reach their dreams of college and master's degrees, but sadly many of them will not.  In order to apply to universities in Peru, students have to take a standardized test, which almost all high schools leave them unprepared for.  So in order to study for the test, students have to pay to study in an academia for about 1-3 years.  This test is pretty much the only standard for acceptance into universities- the students with the highest scores get admitted.  Families with money again have the choice of nacional or particular, but the situation with the universities is different than the high schools- the public universities have a better reputation for preparing students for careers; although there are definitely some good private universities, there are also a lot of private universities that are just concerned with profit and not with education.  However, getting into a public university is close to impossible- for many programs of study, there are only 10-30 openings for thousands of applicants.  So between the difficulty of the entrance exam and the sparse openings, students trying to go to university might be delayed years and years before getting in to an acceptable program.  With this situation, it's easy to see why so many private universities are popping up, but there are still very few higher education opportunities for those who can't afford the private schools.  Oh, and then one more thing- if you do get into a national university, it might take you twice as long to graduate compared to a private university, because the poorly paid professors are so often on strike that full semesters of classes are lost.

So, that's what its like to be a young person who wants to pursue higher education in Peru.   Slowly, literacy rates and education are improving, but it needs to happen much faster.  I think the state needs to invest HEAVILY in education at all levels: measuring schools and teachers better, fixing either the standardized test or the high school curriculums to reduce the need for academias, providing better training for professors and incentives for high-performance, investing in the infrastructure and resources of the schools, and giving public universities the resources to accept more students.  

I can't believe that education wasn't considered one of the keys to sustainable growth by the government conference group.  The need for drastic measures is plainly apparent here in Monsefu, and I hope it is in Lima too.  Only by investing in education will Peru make successful business owners, policy-makers, scientists, and others that empower "sustainable development."