Day 182 Mercado Meeting

Friday 6 Feb 2009

Yesterday I looked at Piura weather forecast for the next three days and it looked like a greater chance of rain for both Saturday and Sunday so this morning Yobani and I ride with Teri to the colegio and go on to the mercado after we drop her off. We ride in Juan’s shiny clean Toyota station wagon and when I hand him a five-sol coin at the mercado he doesn’t give me any change. He seems a nice guy, but Juan evidently thinks he deserves above market price for his service—I guess because he keeps his car spotless.

It’s a bit disappointing at Carniceria Model-O to see only one naked chicken lying in a large bin with the bins on each side of it empty—normally all three bins are full. When the butcher picks up the lonely bird I notice it retains a ‘flat’ shape on the bottom—it makes me wonder how long it’s been there, but we take it. I tell Yobani, “Tu compras, yo pago (You buy, I pay)” and she laughs, but that’s how we spend an hour and 180 soles, food for three for a week.

I continue in an apathetic funk; I’m getting damn tired catching a ‘bug’ every time I ride a bus or an airplane. We got home from our Ecuador/Colombia trip on Wednesday night and I feel like flu is coming on with aching muscles, joints, and ego. I read all afternoon and finish “Prep.” I look up Curtis Sittenfeld online and find she has two more novels behind her already; she was 16 in 1992 when she won Seventeen Magazine’s fiction prize—she’s really good and I won’t be surprised if she wins a Pulitzer Prize someday.

We attend a meeting arranged by Meche, one of our security vigilantes, at Sra Estella’s house in the evening. There are four men, including me, and nine women, including Teri, from the Los Fresnos neighborhood, probably about a quarter of the people covered. Meche points out that since the third vigilante quit there are only two of them and they tried 24-on, 24-off and it didn’t work (what a surprise!) and they’re now doing 12-on, 12-off; all agree that that is best. He says that he thinks everyone should pay the same monthly fee and that everyone should pay on time (hard to argue with that). Teri and I are not the only ones surprised to learn that the range is as little as 20/month to as much as 65/month (we pay 50/month). Nobody seems to know how the rates got to be so different, or if they do they’re not telling. There’s strong agreement around the room that all should pay 50/month but there’s plenty of discussion about the issue with one woman saying she is a widow and can’t afford more than she’s paying now, 40/month. There’s quickly a consensus for an exception. It is also agreed the monthly charge should be applied to each house, not vary with the house location, or street footage, or number of people living in the house. The meeting ends with a promise from one of the men that he’ll write up meeting notes, make copies, and Meche will pass them out with next month’s bill, but I doubt we’ll ever see it—sometimes Meche doesn’t even give us a bill, he just comes around collecting his money like I did when I was a paperboy back in the Central Valley of California.

I tell Teri on the way home that what they really need is a 3rd vigilante, but she tells me that two of them are barely making it splitting the money. That’s why the 3rd guy quit and that’s why Meche mows our lawn for us. We understand that there are 25 houses paying so that means only 625 soles a month for each vigilante or 417 a month when there were three of them. We’re paying Yobani 300/month and she gets room and board