“Regístrese, publíquese, y cúmplase.”

After all that time out of site (in Lima, the United States, and finally Piura for New Year’s and my 22nd birthday), I decided it was time for some quality time (3+ weeks) in Santo Domingo. Time at site is usually pretty broken up, with trips to the city every other weekend or so. This is for a variety of practical reasons: the need to go to the bank and the post office, the need to buy supplies that cannot be found in my town, and the need for phone contact; as well as some more frivolous ones: the need to share success and/or commiserate with other Piura PCVs, the need to eat a turkey-and-salami sandwich, the need for a socially acceptable cold beer, the need to see how long Andrew’s hair has gotten.

The type of extended time at site I’m currently undertaking is a lot easier and more satisfying when I’m busy at work, as I am right now, and when there’s contact with the outside world, in the form of functioning internet. As I mentioned before, the municipality got high-speed internet within the last couple months, but the newest wonderful addition to this is a wireless router. I only live a block from the municipality, for the couple hours a day that they turn the internet on (I mean that pretty literally, someone has to climb a hill to go turn on and off the antennae), I can have high-speed internet in my house. This is only absurd given the other traits of my house: it is made of (crumbling) adobe, half of the rooms still have dirt floors, no rooms have indoor plumbing, and no rooms have an actual ceiling beyond sheet plastic hung to catch the bugs and rain as they fall through the bamboo-and-tin roof. Anyone want to play leapfrog?

The work thing is going pretty well, though. I think I’m reaching a tipping point in my environmental management “project” in which the people I work with aren’t just placating me and patting me on the head, saying “Okay, gringa, you just go ahead and hold a meeting, aren’t you precious,” and actually taking some initiative to get the coordination efforts going. The way in which I realized this was happening was pretty unfortunate: I held a meeting of the Municipal Environmental Commission (which is, despite the name, highly multi-sectoral) to which exactly four people showed up. Not even my counterpart in the municipality, who had signed the invitations to the meeting, showed up, as he was in the provincial capital on business. Well, crap. The good that came out of this was the four dedicated people there (a high school secretary, a representative of the regional government, an engineer/teacher at the tech institute, and an engineer with the Ministry of Agriculture) started an open discussion about what we’re doing well and what we are not, and what we need to improve. The main argument was that the Commission is supposed to be a coordination between all local institutions, and while there are members from all sectors of society, there’s no recognition among the institutions themselves. I had naively assumed that just having people from all different organizations would get the word out that the Commission exists and is the go-to organization for environmental concerns, but of course it takes a more active approach than that. So we are looking into when the meetings of all the local organizations are, starting with the Association of Women, the church-led Committee of Development and Fight Against Poverty, and the Association of Weavers (Peace Corps-formed, my sitemate’s counterpart organization), taking a small amount of time at their meetings, and explaining who we are, what our goals are, and what they can do to participate.

So we rescheduled the meeting, this time putting a boldface clause in the invitation rather indelicately reminding people of the commitment they signed as members of the Commission promising attendance of the monthly meetings, and just in case that wasn’t clear enough, attached said commitment. The day this invitation was written was a great day for Alyssa and Peace Corps generally, as I, for the first time, didn’t write the document. I was, in fact, just sitting in my hammock drinking my morning coffee when my counterpart’s gopher boy knocked on my door and handed me the invitations so I could sign them. Jorge had even already added my “Alyssa Domzal, Voluntaria de Cuerpo de Paz” stamp to the bottom. I was deeply happy with this small victory.

We also attached the municipal ordinance that formally creates the Commission (I have no idea why I keep capitalizing that, but it’s starting to look Orwellian, so maybe I should stop) that was approved in a meeting with the mayor and the five city council members last Friday. My counterpart Jorge asked to attend that meeting and express to the mayor why we are starting this commission. Even though it was Friday afternoon after a busy week and I was exhausted, I went, planning a speech in my head about institutional coordination, priority-setting, and goal completion, but then it turned out what they wanted me to do was in fact to read the entire ordinance, all five pages of it, aloud. Why they asked the one person in the room who was not a native Spanish speaker to read a five-page technical document aloud is slightly beyond me, but, like a lot of things I do in Peru, I thought it would make for a good story, so I did it. The two city councilmen who knew what was up gave kind words about the commission’s goals of environmental protection and cross-sectoral coordination, and the mayor agreed, sent me to make some minor changes, and there we were, a formalized group.

Stuff like municipal ordinances didn’t initially mean much to me, they mostly seemed like bureaucratic trappings of a system that may or may not function, but my counterparts have expressed to me how important they really are, how they make people feel that they are part of something and give them “ganas de trabajar.” This is a continuing part of my learning about Peruvian paperwork, and in a way, Peruvian values. At the same time, I know that I could give the ol’ stamp-and-sign to a million documents and have it not add up to anything real, so I try to keep an eye out for actual signs of progress.

So let me conclude by noting that I am aware that my job is not interesting. This was never clearer than when Andrew and I were in the U.S. together, and people would ask us, “What kind of work do you do?” You can imagine that “I help people build improved wood-burning stoves to improve their respiratory health and keep their small children from burning themselves” gets a far different reaction than “I help people coordinate with each other to create and implement an environmental management plan.” But, as I say now more for my continued self-assurance than for your edification, that I believe in what I’m doing. Santo Domingo doesn’t need help managing short-term rural projects, they need help seeing the big picture and figuring out how, step by step, month by month, they can get to where they want to be. So, like it says at the end of all municipal ordinances, I’ll help them register it, publish it, and complete it.