Home, Sweet Home

My arrival to Cusco on Thursday morning was a little bit like playing make-believe. I was picked up at the airport by the other Cusco interns and office worker, Wilson, Trey, and Tim. When we got to the house the other workers of ASCENDER, Julia, Rubén, and Sandro immediately welcomed me to the team. Obviously, everything was different from where I had come, Utah. The roads, the culture, the people, and especially the language are all things I am hoping to become very familiar with before I leave here. My home away from home was as different from home as possible, but it wouldn’t be any fun if it weren’t that way.

Yesterday I finally got the chance to go down into Sacred Valley with Tim, Julia, Rubén and Sandro. We passed pueblos built from mud and stone, dirt roads, and simple architecture with the name of their alcalde/mayor covering the walls. Cusco was different, but this was really something else. I had the opportunity to meet many of the families cooperating in a project being carried out by ASCEND and other agencies. ASCEND and Peru Rail had helped three of these communities start a chicken farm, so they had a source of income while they waited for fruit to grow on the trees that were recently planted. I had traveled around the city of Cusco over the past few days, but meeting the people in Sacred Valley is what made this experience go from make-believe to real life. I had read about the projects while in the office, but seeing it had an effect that reading simply could not give.

Even though everything changed the second I got off the airplane, there are always a few things that remind me that I’m not too far from home.

Sarah Mariko Bartlett, Intern Spring 2011

Amazon from Kyle Gray on Vimeo.

It is not all work on an international internship with Ascend, (even though work is great with Ascend). An international internship gives you the chance to take some time off and explore some of the beautiful places that South America has to offer.

La Margen Derecha of Cusco

Weekly Updates 15

ASCENDER in Cusco

Weekly Updates 11,12,13,14

New Weekly Reports from Cusco

Intern Geoffrey here, I have been writing weekly reports for ASCEND HQ and the Hinckley Institute for internal reporting. They are written for a general audience so I will share them with you here.

Week 7 2/22/10-2/26/10 Cusco, Peru Geoffrey Strom

We began our journey by loading up the truck with crutches, a wheelchair, and two shovels. The crutches and wheelchair were for a young man in the small mountain town of Patabamba. The two shovels were for digging the wheels out of the mud which is common on the high Andean dirt road toward Quenko. On the highway outside of Cusco we passed the prominent roadside Incan ruins of Saqsawaman and Puca Pucara. After getting of the highway a few towns into the Inca's Sacred Valley, the hard pack single track road began. Up and up we went, the valley slowly opened like a mouth as the towns below became smaller and smaller. Traversing various valleys we came upon expansive fields of flowers, steep mountainside cultivations, herders and their sheep and a few kids who needed a lift back to their house further down the road. They had woken up at five, before the sun, to walk to their family's fields to tend them and harvest grass to feed their cuyes. After dropping them off in their community we climbed so more before dropping into a valley with a tremendous view of the Vilcanota River and city of Coya below.

The river was of muddy contrast to the bright summer greens of the skirts of the mountains which encompassed it. Evidence of the previous month's flooding along the river could be seen as brown stains in otherwise green and healthy fields. All of these communities had been affected by the torrential rain either directed through crop damage or due to the drop in tourism and coincidently sales of their textiles. We eventually made it to Patabamba, situated on an angular plateau straddled by two forested ravines. Only having passed a few of the reddish brown adobe houses of the community did Tim spot the intended recipient of the mobility enhancing devices. Lidio was sitting on a cinderblock in a muddy area between houses as we approached him. He explained to us that his mother was at a weekly community meeting and his father was working. He remembered the ASCEND expedition that came through a year before and we wheeled his gift towards him. He propped himself up on two cane-like sticks to softly land in his new wheelchair donated by ASCEND. Tim and I pushed him up to the street so he could enjoy his new freedom. His smile was big when we arrived but grew brighter and whiter as his wheels hit the dirt road. We walked with him toward the meetinghouse as we needed to talk to his mother. She pardoned herself from the meeting and became as jovial as her son upon seeing him waiting for her outside.

We went back to their house and chatted as Tim went off to buy Lidio a notebook for the upcoming school year. We departed with their gratitude in our hearts and drove another ten minutes to the community of Quenko where ASCEND has been constructing a school for this mountainous community. We arrived and talked to the construction workers about what worked was left to be completed. The finishing touches are all that remain and the schoolroom with be another notch in the ASCEND's belt. A notch to be proud of due to the precious aesthetic of the white walls, red clay tilted roof and the exposed wooden eucalyptus beams inside the classroom. The community has been put forth an immense effort in the construction and the students in Quenko will soon have a new educational environment.

Synergy In Peru for a Superior Outcome

Government, Police and NGO’s Working Together for a Better Tomorrow

This week, Ascend Peru witnessed an amazing reunion of more than eighteen different organizations working together towards a common goal. We were lucky enough to lend a helping hand last weekend for a medical campaign organized by the NGO World Vision in an impoverished area of Cusco known as “La Margen Derecha.” As a result of the assistance we provided setting up tents and giving a talk to the children about basic hygiene, we were invited to a gathering of the “Committee for the Protection of Boys, Girls and Adolescents of the Margen Derecha.” The team of Ascend Peru was able to see firsthand the benefits of drastically different organizations with diverse areas of focus playing on the strengths of one another to achieve a superior outcome, a concept known as “synergy.”

The aforementioned committee combines the prowess of organizations that have knowledge of the law, healthcare, education along with the physical support of the local municipalities and the national police to achieve what one organization alone could not plausibly pull off. After one year of working together, members of the community have noticed the pay off that this committee has had in the lives of some of the poorest citizens of Cusco. Among these benefits are the free medical campaigns coupled with training that alleviates immediate medical need while simultaneously reducing a families need to seek medical attention in the future due to turning better practices into routing. Another is training in human and civil rights that educate communities to better understand how to make their voice heard and avoid being taken advantage. Also, mental health and effective parenting training helps to coach parents how to keep their kids interested in school, off the streets and out of trouble.

Specialization is a concept that is not new for Ascend. Due to the acknowledgment of the fact that we can’t do everything perfectly, Ascend recognizes the need to work jointly with other organizations in order to carry out objectives that it could not possibly fulfill alone. As an arm of the Ascend Alliance whose current goals include expansion of staff and activities, Ascend Peru is looking for its place in multiparty efforts where our strengths will be amplified by the unified effort of many different organizations all playing on what is their forte. An additional benefit of synergy is the possibility of learning to better ourselves by working in close proximity with likeminded organizations that are specialists in areas where we currently lack expertise. All of these efforts play into the goal of empowering those in need to lift themselves out of poverty and give their children a brighter future.

On another note, the programs of Ascend Peru have been going well over the past couple of weeks and we have implemented new programs and have plans for more in the near future. We have a new Ascend Business Training class in a town called Huasao, which is famous for its “brujos” (male witches). This class is comprised of women who want to become renowned for their hen culinary dishes, and we think that there is a ton of potential. Additionally, we have implemented a new “Health Starts at Home” class, which aims to teach women about their role in implementing a healthy lifestyle for themselves and their children. We also carried out visits to some of our ABT Graduates to see how things were going and to see if we could help out in any way. We were glad to see that these businesses have had greater success as the result of ABT training. Go Ascend Peru! Happy Halloween!