Colonial Spanish Balconies, Eyeglasses Ceremony, Camu-Camu, and Chancaca Molasses

7 January 2018

Part of the joy of living in Lima is the amount of Spanish culture and colonial architecture. It often feels more Spanish here than in Spain! This is an interesting place to serve a humanitarian mission.

Spanish colonial balconies in Lima - hundreds were built between the 1600s to the 1800s. In certain places, it feels like being in Europe. (Note the satellite dishes hanging from the sides of these historic balconies).

Spanish balconies are maintained all around Lima - a reminder of the days gone by.

Final Trip to Pucallpa

Our trip to Pucallpa on Christmas Day was supposed to include a delivery ceremony for the thousand eyeglasses we donated. However, at the last minute, the ceremony was postponed because the remodel work on the school wasn't finished. They rescheduled for this week and then Moroni Torres, the Area Welfare Manager in our office, decided I would accompany him. (Sandy got to stay in Lima and avoid the 18-hour day trip).

Ucayali River in the Amazon basin. View from our plane at 6 a.m. just as the morning river fog was burning off the jungle at daybreak.

Government and school officials, as well as other health authority leaders, gathered at one of the 41 schools where students were receiving the eyeglasses in order to hold the ceremony.

A few of the eyeglasses for the delivery ceremony - a thousand children were measured two weeks previous and now have received the eyeglasses to help them see.

Children and their parents at the ceremony to receive the donation of glasses.

Children received their eyeglasses as part of the ceremony.

Our area welfare manager, Moroni Torres, and one of the students who received the eyeglasses. The kids all got to pick their own frames, so this should encourage them to wear the glasses.

Ceremonies are extremely important to Peruvians, especially the formality of a delivery ceremony. First, it formalizes the donation and lets everyone know the importance of maintaining the items. Next, it gives a chance for health officials, government leaders, and others to give speeches in front of crowds. And finally, it is a chance to celebrate (which Peruvians especially love). The children received their eyeglasses, leaders gave their speeches, and everyone got to party with three bands of traditional music. It was a great day.

Various traditional music groups of the jungle performed. They make their own flutes out of plastic tubing so they won't rot in the high humidity of the jungle.

Live traditional music made the event even more fun.

We always team up with local partners on our humanitarian projects. Why? Because we can do things as a team that we can't do on our own. For example, on this donation of eyeglasses, we could donate the eye exams and the eyeglasses themselves for a thousand children. But, we couldn't perform the screening on the 10,000 students in each of their schools in order to select the 1,000 that needed glasses. Also, we couldn't distribute all the glasses to children in 41 schools. Our partners in the regional government and health authority had to help with all of that coordination.

Moroni Torres and I, along with our partners at the Ucayali regional government and the Direccion Regional de Salud (the regional health authority) who helped make this vision campaign a success.

Jungle Fruit - Camu-Camu

Many fruits here in Peru never make it out from the jungle to the cities due to lack of transportation, spoilage, etc. When we go to the jungle, we try all the incredible fruits that are almost never found in Lima. One of them is camu-camu.

Camu-camu - fruit found only out in the jungle.

Camu-camu is the most tart fruit I have ever tasted. It is somewhere between the taste of a lemon and cranberries. Usually, they take the juice of the fruit and turn it into an incredible drink by adding lots of sugar (like lemonade).

Refreshing camu-camu. With enough sweetener, it looks and tastes like pink lemonade.

On our last two trips to Pucallpa, we saw the camu-camu orchards and ate the fruit right off the tree (like eating a whole pack of SweetTarts in every bite). 

The camu-camu plant grows in low jungle areas that are often submerged under water. The local Indian communities harvest the fruit in canoes during the wet season.

Orchard of camu-camu in Pucallpa. The trees are partially submerged by high water from the Ucayali River.

Local Indian groups harvest the camu-camu fruit in these homemade canoes.

And, as the waters continue rising in the Ucayali River, most of the stilt houses will be up to their front doors in river water in the next few weeks, just in time to start harvesting the camu-camu.

The waters are already rising along the river. Thank goodness for the stilts that will hopefully keep these houses dry.

Make your own Molasses

Some food items we take for granted in the USA are really hard to find here in Peru. Molasses are one of those items.  But, now we can make our own molasses from a product commonly found here called "Chancaca", which is a by-product of refining sugar cane.

Raw sugar chancaca in a molded shape the size of a cupcake.

Chancaca is poured into molds as part of the manufacturing process. After they cool down, they wrap up eight of these molded sugar cakes in strips of palm leaves and sell them in markets.

Chancaca wrapped up in strips of palm leaves for sale. Each package contains eight molded chancaca cakes.

We buy chancaca in local markets, then take it home for making molasses. The bag shown here contains eight molded sugar cakes and costs around $5 USD.

To make molasses, you put a cake of chancaca into a pot, mix in a little water, then boil it for 10 or 20 minutes. The result is thick and very tasty molasses.

Boiling chancaca to make our homemade molasses

We can also make brown sugar (which is impossible to find in Peru) by mixing a tablespoon of molasses with a cup of white sugar. Ah, nothing is impossible here, given a little bit of experimenting.  

And so our next week promises to be full of more adventures as we press on with the many projects that are awaiting us. We like the work here and count it a privilege to be able to serve.