PIURA!

To get to this workshop that lasts from the 13th to the 15th from Ancash requires much anticipation. We left San Marcos at noon (the only bus that day that would have gotten us there in time), arrived in Huaraz at 4pm, left on the overnight bus to Trujillo at 9pm (the only time available), arrived in Trujillo at 6am, left for Chiclayo at 6:30am (racing across town in a taxi to a different agency), arrived at 9:45am to leave Chiclayo at 10:15am (racing across town in a taxi to a different agency), to arrive in beautiful Piura City (do see the new Lonely Planet Guide: Peru for confirmation on that) around noon. Um, we were tired. All in all, it was, transportation-wise, an amazing trip as we accidentally got on all of these buses just as they were leaving and there was enough space for our own little party of five (Tsutsuy, Libby and counterpart, Amanda and counterpart), which is practically impossible most of the time.
We arrived excitedly to the hotel to find out that Peace Corps had split up lodgings and half of us were really staying across town. Urgh.
Oh well, the workshop was really interesting and the speakers, if you will, actually run an alternative radio station in Lima. The down side was that their target audience is, well, Lima. Hence and urban environment whereas we are working with the most rural of rural environments.
In our towns, the radio is usually all families have to listen to music, learn about news, or hear what is gong on in their communities. For example, the health promoters that I work with only know when their next meeting is by listening to the radio station. They are so far away that it would be ridiculous to walk to the health center (sometimes a four hour journey) to see when the next event is so they listen to the radio. When men and women go out to their farms to work or when students start the long walk to school, they wear small portable radios around their necks. It’s really an amazing untapped market.
A volunteer that lives here in Ancash has already started a radio show in the evenings in his community. The radio signal reaches farther than just his town and one night a man tracked him down from a nearby community to ask about starting an organic compost project in his town.
When you walk through the town at night, you can sometimes hear the children in their houses shouting his “English phrase of the day” as he says it on the radio.
Hearing stories like this makes me really excited to get started.
AND I actually might! The local radio station has offered a time slot to the health center to start a radio show about health related topics. And after asking my counterpart about when we were going to start for a month and a half, I finally talked to the health center director who told me… they have no intention of utilizing that time slot at all. SO, I said, “Tsutsuy and I can do the show! Would the health center be OK with that as well as support us with health information, interviews, etc.?”
The director said, “Sure! That would be fine!”
Now that being said, there were no papers signed, and in this world, this means that he could quite possibly deny the entire conversation ever took place. One of my good friends at the health center “witnessed” the conversation so hopefully I’ll have some back up. :)