Learning to Fish

By Andy Coyne

Lewis, the white-bearded ZZ Top look-alike orthopedic surgeon from Kenosha, Wisconsin, went straight for the big question: "Did it do any good?"  What Lewis wanted to know, as the three of us inched our way down the Amazon River, was whether my father, in his stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru 37 years earlier, had actually accomplished anything.

 
"Yes, I think so," was the modest reply of the man affectionately referred to as "El Gringo Alán" in the fishing village known as La Caleta de San José.  If the universally warm welcome we had received there is any indication, the people of San José were more than satisfied with their gringo.  

 
From 1966 to 1968, my father spent two years of his late twenties in this small town on the Pacific coast of northern Peru.  His project was a financial cooperativa, a locally-owned community bank for fishermen.  One hundred fifty residents of San José invested an average of about $70 apiece - a month and a half of income for most families.  The cooperativa then extended loans to fishermen for the boats, nets and other supplies needed in their trade.  

 
I had heard about San José and my father's work there many times, literally for my entire life.  I had listened to the stories and seen the slides.  And every story or slideshow ended with the same thought: "One day, I will go back."  After 31 years, I got around to saying what had to be said: "Basta.  Enough is enough.  Let's go."

Homecoming

 
My father wanted to return to see how his friends had fared the intervening decades.  Not knowing who was still in San José, we had no idea who or what we would encounter there.

 
When we arrived, we made our way to Calle Grau, where Dad had lived.  As our taxi came to a halt, we were immediately surrounded by dozens of curious, peering eyes, two of which had been waiting for us.  Chuncho had found El Gringo Alán.

 
"Alan Richards?" he asked, with a furtive look at his left forearm, as he leaned into the window.  "Yes, that's me," my father said, and from that moment on, Chuncho was our guide, from the past into the present, through San José.  

 
Chuncho was a young boy when Dad was first here, just old enough to remember spending every afternoon with the gringo across the street - playing board games, joking, chatting, learning.  When Chuncho heard we were coming to town, he set out to find us and was waiting on Calle Grau at the right moment.  On his arm, he had scribbled the words "Alan Richards," my Dad's first and middle names, in order to be sure to get the right gringo.

El Desfile del Gringo Alán

Chuncho then set out to show us the town and proudly show my father all that had changed in 37 years - paved streets, reliable electricity and indoor plumbing, to name a few.  As the three of us shuffled along, he and Dad caught up and Chuncho shared his memories with me.

 
"Your father had a game called Monopoly," he told me in Spanish, and then went on to describe the houses and the hotels.  "And a strange leather ball," he reminisced, "not round like a fútbol, but long like a watermelon.  What's that called?"

 
"A football," I replied.  "Not a fútbol, but a football, to play American football."  This created more than a little confusion, but eventually we moved on.  

 
Walking down the street with Chuncho, we came upon his father, Fortunato.  The dynamic changed the instant our group grew from three to four: Chuncho deferred to his father in such a way that as we walked, he stayed in the background with me, while our fathers walked ahead.

 
As we ambled along, Chuncho periodically stuck his head in a doorway and said, "Do you remember El Gringo Alán?  He's back!"  Soon our group of four swelled to ten, then twenty, then thirty.  People who had known my father came out to say hello, while others trailed alongside just to watch.  The children followed us everywhere, with the same intense curiosity that my father had seen in San José's children 37 years earlier.  They begged - not for money or toys or food - but for photos.  Word spread that we had digital cameras and the kids delighted in having their pictures taken and then being able to see them instantly on the backs of our cameras.

 
It was a homecoming parade - el Desfile del Gringo Alán - and everyone turned out to celebrate.

The burro-hunting party

 
Thirty-seven years ago, the streets of San José were cluttered with donkeys, the sight, sound and smell of which were an indelible component of the town's character.  Imagine my disappointment when I found hundreds of cars and Peru's ubiquitous moto-taxis in their place.

 
So I asked the children: "Dónde están los burros?"

 
"Ya no hay," they told me; there aren't any. 

 
This just couldn't be right, I said, there must be at least one donkey, somewhere.

 
I set out with a handful of San José's sharpest minds under the age of ten, in search of a burro.  Our search party soon found the sole remaining donkey in San José standing alone in an intersection.  He looked thoroughly perplexed and out of place, as if Dad had left him right there 37 years ago.

"Cómo se llama?" I asked the children, who chuckled at my ridiculous question, as if I were asking the name of a car or a moto-taxi.

 
Pedro, we agreed, would be this lonely burro's name.  And I expect that Pedro will be standing there waiting when I return 37 years from now, although this time he will at least be fortunate enough to have a name.

A journey, without leaving town

Aside from the paved streets, electricity and indoor plumbing, the change that most shocked my father was the fate of his good friend Erasmo Fiestas Fiestas.  Since Dad's departure in 1968, Erasmo had gone from pauper to pillar of the community, quite literally from rags to riches.

 
When Dad met him in the 1960s, Erasmo was a young father and husband, sleeping on the dirt floor of his in-laws' home.  He had the distinction of being high school-educated, without the distinction of appropriate work.  As a result, he and his young family lived in the most austere of conditions and the outlook for their future showed little promise for improvement.

 
Erasmo is now a relatively affluent father of two and grandfather of four.  He works at the town hall and has clearly benefited from decades of gainful employment.  As Dad is telling me that in 1968, the people of San José had no money for such luxuries as holiday decorations, he points out that his friend has not one but two Christmas trees in his home.  After 37 years, things are looking up for some people in San José.

Perspective

 
We had brought toys - matchbox cars, animals and dinosaurs - to hand out to the children in San José, a town so disadvantaged that it lacks such basic amenities as postal service and public transportation.  But Erasmo's son Carlos said not to give out any of our toys in San José, but to save them for the kids in the countryside.  I soon found out why when I met the barefoot children just outside of town.

 
Each time that I penetrated another layer of Peru, I saw the country with new eyes and my perspective on its economic conditions evolved.  As I left one place behind, I readjusted my expectations in another.  When I landed in Lima, I thought I saw poverty on those streets.  Arriving in Chiclayo, a city of 400,000 in the north of the country, I realized that Lima is relatively prosperous.  In San José, I came to understand that Chiclayo, by comparison, is modern and affluent.  Now that I have seen the longing in the eyes of the children in the countryside of Lambayeque department, I am left thinking that San José kids are fortunate; and I am left wondering what comes next.

Learning to fish

 
The economy of San José is inextricably tied to the sea.  Both in 1968 and now, the vast majority of workers earn their livelihoods from the fishing industry.  The men build ships and sail them - for up to several days at a time - catching guitarra, raya and bonita, while the women work nearby cleaning the fish and preparing them for market.

The problem is that it is no longer profitable to fish off San José year-round.  Now San José fishermen only fish during a brief period once every six months.  During the rest of the year, Chimbote, a town several hours down the coast, plays host to many of San José's fishermen.  Unlike San José, Chimbote does not produce fish for direct human consumption, but instead yields tons of anchovies that are ultimately used for fish meal.

 
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime."  The mantra of my father's Peace Corps supervisor, Aquiles Lanao Flores, was a refrain that I heard many times throughout my childhood.  The meaning of those words came into sharp relief for me when I saw his San José, where there is not enough work to go around, leaving hundreds of able-bodied fishermen idle on any given day.

 
Some, however, refuse to wait patiently for work and instead choose to take their economic fates into their own hands.  On a visit to the San José shipyard, I met an unlikely shipbuilder bearing the same name as the town itself.  José was educated as a mechanical engineer.  When work in his chosen field was not forthcoming, José didn't hesitate to make other plans.

 
When I met José that day in the shipyard, he was a carpenter working on the cabin of a fishing boat; when I stumbled upon him later that evening, he was on his way to do odd jobs at a print shop with his wife.  José and I shared a taxi to Chiclayo and continued our conversation from that afternoon in the shipyard.  His advice is that those waiting for the fish need to learn something new, move on, adapt.  As the sun sets across the semi-desert surrounding us, he tells me: "If you give a man a fish . . . "

Welcoming embrace

 
In my travels, I have become accustomed to the notion that people are fundamentally the same everywhere: beneath the superficialities of race, language, geography and occupation, most people I know have many of the same priorities in life.

 
With that in mind, I was surprised to see exactly how quickly and forcefully one particular issue comes to the forefront of every conversation in San José - family.

In the U.S. and Europe, the first question in many conversations would be about work: "What do you do for a living?"  In San José, the opening conversational salvo is unfailingly about family: "Are you Alán's only son?  Eldest son?  Are you married?  How many children do you have?"

After a litany of such questions runs its course, you can see that every listener has heard, absorbed and memorized your family tree.  Then, as a quiet voice emerges from the back of the room, the family tree takes on new branches: "Your sister, Alán's second child, does she have children?"

This degree of interest in family added another dimension to the welcoming embrace that we had the privilege of receiving from the people of San José.  The town was accepting not just us, but vicariously our entire family that we had left behind in the U.S.  I have the distinct impression that if one day my Maya, Rory or Savannah arrive in San José years from now, someone will say "You're Alán's grandchild."  The first question, of course, will then be: "So, how many children do you have?"

Click on the photo below to watch a short video about San Jose, Peru. 

San José, Peru