Hoosier Prof in Peru

The price of wheat is rising worldwide, and that’s bad news in Peru, where breakfast often starts and ends with bread.

Government representatives and breadmakers met this week to talk about how to bulk up wheat production inside Peru, reducing the reliance on imports. But those talks would at best have an impact years from now, since adding wheat plantations will take time.

Meanwhile, the busiest aisle in supermarkets is usually the one with baked goods, with bins of fresh bread and rolls. The most popular bread appears to be a crusty, single-serving, rectangular white bread, sometimes with a groove cut lengthwise, so that you can easily pull it apart for spreading butter and jam. Many students say they have bread for breakfast with their host families, adding strawberry or peach jam or a fried egg.

Commuters may get their bread from a kiosk on the street. It’s not uncommon to see a person in a suit having a power breakfast: a triple-decker sandwich with, for example, avocado, ham and cheese, each one to a layer.

The breadmakers are hoping to increase interest in varieties other than the plain white. Toward that end, a “bread festival” will be held in a few weeks with samples made from Peruvian wheat. It may be a hard sell. It’s rare to see whole wheat or other hearty varieties like seven-grain. (Potato or yucca bread would be a natural.)

“There is a variety of bread, but people from Lima keep eating white bread,” a nutritionist, Milagros Agurto, told a Peruvian daily, Peru 21. She noted that President Alan Garcia tried to promote bread made with sweet potato flour years ago, during this first term, but without much success.

Knowing that price increases will fall hardest on the poor, and that a restless electorate will make for turmoil in the halls of Congress, Garcia’s administration increased the minimum wage by 50 soles (about $16).

Meanwhile, the Peruvian sol has been gaining mightily against the dollar, causing more turmoil in the economy. The value of the dollar hit a record low yesterday, trading for 3.09 soles in the street (and 3.10 in the supermarket, where you can usually get the best rate of all; the exchange rate at banks is always lower than that offered on the street). When we arrived in July, we were getting 3.15 soles per dollar.

This fall is troubling news for exporters in fishing, agriculture, textiles, mining (and for Goshen College, since we depend on the money exchangers on the blocks near our apartment). But this also means that Peru is in less debt to international lenders, and imports will be cheaper for consumers. The cost of pirated DVDs at kiosks in nearby markets — three for 10 soles — should not be affected.

Before I came to Peru, I thought that I knew potatoes. You’ve got your two basic potato camps: the white and the sweet. You can mash them, fry them, scallop them, boil them, bake them, microwave them and even turn them into ink stamps. You can add salt, pepper, butter, chives, sour cream and marshmallows (although ever since a marshmallow-topped sweet potato dish disagreed with me at a childhood Thanksgiving dinner I’ve cautioned everyone I meet against this combination).

At the end of the day, though, potatoes are like a tubular version of Rodney Dangerfield: “I don’t get no respect. I played hide-and-seek, and they wouldn’t even look for me.” Everyone credits the Irish with inventing them, and McDonald’s with making them good. Educated people in high places — like a former vice president of the United States, a Hoosier no less — can’t be bothered to get their name right.

Having been to the Centro Internacional de la Papa in Lima, or the International Potato Center, I will never look on a potato, or eat a potato, in quite the same way. The center, known by its Spanish acronym CIP, seeks to reduce poverty and achieve food security in developing countries through research on potato, sweet potato and other root and tuber crops. With an international team of scientists from 25 countries, the center operates experimental stations high in the Andes, in Huancayo, and in San Ramón, on the eastern, rainforest side.

After a lunch in the center’s cafeteria, which included sliced potatoes on a bed of lettuce and fried fish and rice with a sweet potato on the side, we had a chance to meet some of the researchers and the subjects of their study. Among the potato varieties we learned about (and there are some 4,000 varieties) are the seranita, with yellow flesh, and the peruanita, white with red speckles. We heard about a potato that is used as a medicine in the highlands but that is so stinky that at one food festival, even with accomplished chefs presiding, everyone stayed away from the booth with the odd smell. We saw a potato that looks like a puma’s paw (and hence its name in Quechua) and another one called something like “Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry” (it is a sphere of endless bumps, and folk history has it that a prospective bride’s skill and readiness for marriage was put to the test in peeling the potato).

Here are a few other interesting facts:

1) The potato originated in the Andes, and was introduced in Spain in 1560 and in the United Kingdom in 1580.

2) For the last 10 years, potato production has increased at an annual average rate of 4.5%.

3) The potato is the fourth-most-important food crop in the world after rice, wheat and maize.

4) The potato yields more nutritious food more quickly on less land and in harsher climates than any other major crop: up to 85 percent of the plant is edible human food, while for cereals the figure is around 50 percent.

5) China is now the world’s largest potato producer.

6) 2008 is the U.N. International Year of the Potato.

On a personal note, my favorite potato dish is papa rellena, a mashed potato cake filled with meat and complements (maybe olives, garlic and raisins), and then lightly fried.

We had been painting the outside wall of a community center for about an hour when my 9-year-old partner, whose black hair was by now speckled spring green, dashed inside. Some of the Goshen College students in our group were passing out crackers, bananas and bottles of water to the dozens of children who crowded around them. Minutes later, my painting partner, Frank, was back; he gave me a cracker and half a banana, and then opened the water bottle, ready to share that as well. In the place where we were, Pueblo Joven Pamplona, high on a hill overlooking Lima, it was an act of supreme generosity.

Lima, especially in some areas, like Miraflores, where we live, does well at masking the fact that the city is actually situated in a desert (Miraflores’s central park looks springlike, with its green grass and flowers, even during winter, which we’re just leaving behind); but when you take a bus to the southeastern edge of the city, and climb the hills, you reach houses — shacks, really — that are built on sand. In the shantytowns of Plamplona, the one- or two-room homes have no running water. They use water tanks, filled by a roaming truck that charges a high price, as you might expect for a scarce resource.

The community center is run by young volunteers from the Alianza evangelical church. They bring love and water and coloring books for children who might be on their own for the better part of the day, as their parents travel down into the city for work. We joined the volunteers on Saturday, helping to paint the building and play games with the children. One child tried to teach me to pick up a spinning top with my hand, but I was beyond tutoring.

Two thoughts came to mind later in the weekend, as we were back in the comforts of our apartment, with running water and a fast computer connection. One is the dizzying gap between the bare poverty we saw in Pueblo Joven Pamplona and the kind of wealth that is taken for granted in the United States, especially on Wall Street right now.

The No. 1 article in the “most popular” listing in The New York Times today, as measured by the number of times that articles are e-mailed to friends and colleagues, is called “Age of Riches: Hedge Funds and Private Equity Alter Career Calculus.” The article tells of a new breed of “traders and high-octane number crunchers on Wall Street” who have “the need for speed and a thirst for instant riches.” They forgo M.B.A. degrees — the central point of the story — because they can enjoy seven-figure payouts without having to do that extra labor and take time out from earning money. A few years of finance experience will let you earn $337,000 a year; a few more years, and you’re at $830,000.

No matter how much money one earns, though, it’s hard to deny a God-given human impulse to share, in time. These young traders “spoke as if a money-clock were ticking: many said they wanted to make as much money as fast as they could so that they could live in style later in life while doing less lucrative things like running a charity. . .”

My daughter Emily was along at Pamplona on Saturday. Her thoughts were far from Wall Street, but at least indirectly aware of the global maldistribution of resources. “The saddest thing,” she said, “was when the kids were fighting over the water and the food because we all knew that they didn’t have enough. I thought the funnest thing was playing with the kids because they were really cute and friendly. They loved the bubbles and the playdough the most. Some of the kids were really artistic. We looked at one picture drawn by a girl and thought it was from a coloring book.”

So much potential on a hill of sand.

The mayor of Surco, a district in Lima, is leading a campaign to end begging in the streets.

At first blush, the campaign, called “Say No to Begging,” seems unconscionably cold-hearted, especially since it was announced during Children’s Week. But the mayor said his intent was to improve the quality of life for the children by getting them off the streets, where they sell candy or perform stunts on behalf of adults, who then pocket the money.

“We have seen a large quantity of children asking for money, with adults behind them, who transport them and leave them at street corners,” the mayor said. “This is nothing but child abuse.”

Rather than give money to children on the streets, the mayor would have motorists (who provide most of the money) donate to the municipality’s free-lunch program, which feeds about 150 children a day.

The mayor’s campaign made me think of how often in the course of a day I face quick decisions on whether to give money: to someone who is politely begging for a small coin or two, 10 or 20 or 50 centimos, truly pennies by the exchange rate; or a wandering musician looking to collect a tip for a song played on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant at lunchtime; or a child hoping to sell a pack of gum through an open taxi window.

The biblical way suggests giving without limits. But the number of people asking for money can be overwhelming. If you gave to everyone who asked, or bought from every hawker who approached, the psychological weight of it all, apart from the personal economics, could be crippling in its own way. And at the other extreme, should you simply say no to all askers? And if you opt for a middle course, sometimes giving money and sometimes not, to whom will you say no?

Over the years, I’ve followed different strategies. I can remember living in New York City soon after college and deciding always to give to the first person who asked for money, and then no more for that day. Or to give to children, no matter what, or to mothers with children, always. And never to give to the guys with squeegies who aggressively cleaned windshields without first asking (this happened once here, and the driver waved the young man away).

My giving is not so systematically set in place in Lima, at least not yet — in part because I haven’t thought as much about this over the last seven years while living in Goshen. Sometimes when asked, I will give, but not always, especially when I’m in a hurry. I do know that when I make eye contact with the person who is asking for help, when that elemental human bond has been made, there is usually no walking on by. And creativity and originality tend to be rewarded. A few weeks ago, while we were in a taxi waiting at a long traffic light, three young men performed amazing flips and handstands in the street, and quite a few of us gave them money (don’t tell the mayor).

I happened across an insightful blog posting on this subject, Planned Giving, by Susan Palwick, an English professor and volunteer chaplain, who offered her personal guidelines, which should be shared:

1. Try to give a little bit of money, and without asking how it will be used.

2. Even if you don’t give money, make some sort of human contact.

3. Consider how you can become personally involved in helping the poor through churches, government agencies or other groups (this would align with the mayor’s position).

4. Read Christine Pohl’s book Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, for reflections on extending hands to the poor, on burnout and on boundary setting.

The 16 Goshen College students who are here now, safely arrived on Thursday night and living with families across Lima, will have many questions to answer for themselves over these next three months, including: what will you do when asked to give?