Cusco Meets Haight-Ashbury

My wife Alison and I are in Peru right now attending an annual meeting of a small group of school heads and their spouses from around the globe. The meetings start today and are being hosted at Markham College in Lima – a British-Peruvian PreK-to Grad school of 2000 that is known for technology, innovation, a bilingual program, outdoor education, and international education. (More on Markham once the meetings start.)

This is our first visit to South America, so there are many new and intriguing experiences for us. We took advantage of the trip to visit Cusco, the ‘historical Andean capital’ of Peru, the seat of the ancient Inca Empire, and a UNESCO world heritage site. It is located at the edge of the Andes with an elevation of 3400m (more than 2 miles) above sea level and used as a jumping off point to many of the spectacular Peruvian historical sites, including the Sacred Valley and Machu Pichu, named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. If you ever have the opportunity, you should visit this remarkable region and experience both the generous culture and rich history of the region.

Cusco was lovely and the people were delightful. It is clear after only a couple of days in Lima that the culture and make-up of the Andean people is very different than that of this rich, bustling, cosmopolitan city.

While proceeding to our flight in Cusco, Alison and I followed what appeared to be a North American couple through security. They looked right out of casting as aging hippies from Haight-Ashbury, complete with native bags and colorful cloaks. We struck up a conversation and discovered that they were indeed from the San Francisco Bay area (Berkeley to be exact) but that this region of Peru is their second home. They have been coming here for more than a decade. She is a language educator and he is a contractor.

When I asked him more about what he works with, he said water. From before we arrived in Peru, Alison and I were well-aware of the massive issues with freshwater in this country. The tourist guides suggest that you do not drink the water even in major hotels in the big cities. In rural areas, it is certainly out of the question. It seems so odd that in country marked by beautiful mountain streams, rich agricultural valleys and an abundance of what seems like pristine countryside, the water supply is so compromised. Bottled water seemed to be a booming industry throughout the country and the large piles of bags filled with recycled bottles in every town gave further evidence to the hydrological reality. One of our tour guides reported that Incan engineering featured clean water sources running through the middle of streets in their cities, while sewage was handled otherwise – the total opposite to European design. So with the Conquest and the arrival of the Spanish, the co-mingling of these systems resulted in large-scale contamination and disease. These issues have been further compounded by problematic agricultural concentration and widespread chemical contamination of water sources by large scale mining – the two most important economic drivers in rural Peru.

So our hippy friend from Berkeley (I think Dean was his name) was there doing work with small Andean communities in trying to secure clean water through purification systems. Like many parts of the world, rural Peru faces a huge social problem with unsafe water. It creates health issues that multiply and mutate to create debilitating impacts on areas as varied as child mortality, the economy, education, and sense of community. Access to clean water is one of the great world problems, which we in Canada often don’t full appreciate because we have 20% of the world’s freshwater supply (most of it clean) and less than one half of one percent of the world’s population.

Dean outlined the project he was working on now – dealing with town leaders to import microfiltration systems to remove organic waste (things like human and animal waste) from local water supplies. He plans to have these systems manufactured in Michigan then shipped to Peru. Chemical contamination, on the other hand, (the most common implication of mining) requires reverse osmosis systems. Because these are so energy-dependent, and power is very expensive in Peru, it raises other issues. There are discussions around designing mini-hydroelectric systems on rivers in order to power these types of purification systems. I wonder about solar systems and the potential for a couple of these economically desperate towns to get involved in the manufacturing of the filtration systems. It was very easy to get really excited by the potential to make a large-scale change in rural Peruvian society (and many other countries for that matter) by the use of small-scale innovations in conjunction with local communities.

I had two take-aways from this conversation:

1)      Dean’s work is exactly what we should be encouraging in our students. It is he kind of ethos that we are promoting through the Appleby Diploma in Global Leadership. It requires the merger of creativity, practical problem-solving skills (in this case linked to very basic chemical engineering), a sensitivity towards culture and collaboration, as well as the belief that you can make a difference even in a land that you haven’t grown up in.

 

2)      More often than not talking to that person who looks a bit eccentric or different can be entertaining, stimulating or a window on a new way of thinking.