As municipal gardens were trimmed and the streets cleaned ready for a vast influx of tourists, the central plaza gave itself over to a schoolchildren’s procession raising environmental awareness.

In a country where Pachamama – the spirit of mother earth – is a key indigenous figure, environmentalism will always have a profound cultural significance – but with mining as one of the nation’s primary industries, there’s a delicate balance to be wrought.

This week, as I’ve spoken to fellow professionals in NGOs, businesses and government agencies, time and again we’ve returned to the issue of the environment.

Lloyd Boutcher of Sunvil, a tour operator which holds five-star accreditation for responsible tourism from Britain’s Association of Independent Travel Operators, explained to me that the company sees support for South America’s eco-education schemes as an investment in the future of tourism as well as a social good.

‘Education is key. If you get a local school up and running, and create environmental awareness in children as young as seven or eight, it will stay with them into adulthood. We’ve put money into the Tiskita Foundation, working in southern Costa Rica. Three years ago, local fishermen were hunting turtles, now they’ve been trained as guides taking travelers to see the animals. It has come full circle: making a living from something you were hunting and killing.

Closer to home, here in Ayacucho, questions of environmental protection and sanitation go hand in hand. Where so many remote communities operate without basic utilities, intervention is required to provide a sustainable, unpolluted environment – most importantly of all, with a supply of clean drinking water.

For the staff of Servicios Educativos Rurales (SER), a campaigning Peruvian NGO, the issue of clean water goes to the heart of politics in Ayacucho. Twenty years ago, the province saw a brutal civil conflict between government forces and the guerrillas of the Shining Path.

‘In the campo, home to much drug production, the communities are very poor. Only four in every hundred people have access to clean drinking water,’ Cesar Alvarez of SER told me.

‘These are the rural communities where Shining Path still has a strong presence. The causes of the violence haven’t gone away, and those who were affected by the conflict haven’t had their needs addressed by the state,’ claimed Cesar.

As a campaigning organization, SER sees its duty as monitoring the state, rather than replacing it. Cesar explains: ‘Many NGOs give out food and clothes, which leads the state to pull out and hand responsibility over to them. We refuse to supplant the state, but challenge it to deliver on its obligations.’

However, the SER team find the issue of clean water so pressing that they do provide water utilities, funded by foreign organizations, on behalf of local government.

‘The state has utterly let these communities down on basic utilities. We’re more flexible in responding to local needs, and we maintain relations after projects are completed – we don’t just disappear once the utilities have been installed.’

I’ll be coming back to the question of sustainable development, and talking further with Lloyd and other ‘responsible gringos’, next time.

Matt Finch is an educational consultant from the U.K. and is currently working at the San Domingo Savio primary school in Peru. For more on his experiences, check out his blog.

Children of borrowers

I am talking with a friend about the prevalence of domestic violence in Ayacucho, and frankly, how it seems certain communities are socially accepting of men who beat their wives.  Domestic violence is seen as a solution to keep a woman in line, force them into change or acceptance of change, and most often, it’s a man’s way of releasing pent up anger inside by blaming his wife for all of his problems.  The violence is linked to alcoholism, rampant among men in the community, which then breeds other family-destroying problems such as unemployment and infidelity.  Working in this kind of environment can easily make one disgusted by men (and if it wasn’t for my great husband, I might be there too).  Discussing the stories makes us want to beat the men ourselves – which we know is as ridiculous and senseless as what the men are guilty of.  It’s hard to escape that feeling of wanting to defend a helpless woman and her children, even knowing that violence-begets-violence and that – as cliché as I’m sure it sounds – ‘an eye for an eye just makes the world blind.’

I feel really angry, sad, heartbroken – but mostly just really angry.  I am emotional.  Okay, I am pissed off.  The last charity I worked for, before Kiva, worked with one of the most devastating communities a person can find work with – terminally ill children.  For obvious reasons, we were encouraged to learn the art of not welling up with tears after hearing harrowing stories about the innocent children’s pain.  I found it impossible.  After a year and a half there I could easily still cry at one of the stories I heard on day one.  While I understand the unhealthiness of crying in front of the children, I still would find it hard not to.

I’m grateful for those feelings though, the angry ones, the sad ones, the uneasy feelings and anxiousness.  If it wasn’t for those exact emotions, you better believe these organizations wouldn’t exist in the first place.  Not until you are really stirred by something can you attack it with every battle weapon you’ve got.  It’s about mastering the art of channeling the anger into a relentless ‘I’ve-absolutely-got-to-do-something-about-this’ attitude.  The ‘who’s-with-me’ attitude.  Or the ‘I’m-annoying-people-by-trying-to-get-them-on-board-with-me-but-I-don’t-care-about-that’ attitude (which is basically me… all the time).

That’s why I hope the sad stories keep making me cry and the happy ones keep making me jump for joy.  I wouldn’t be a Kiva Fellow without having had that unrefined emotion, because I wouldn’t want to be.  I’d be somewhere pushing papers, crunching numbers, clocking out, and hitting happy hour.  This life I’m living with a foam mattress on the hard floor, no TV, no microwave, no internet – it isn’t easy but it’s the one that helps me sleep at night.  I love what I’m doing.  And I know I can say that even if today I became a vegetable, I’d be happy with how I’d lived the life I’ve lived.  I may not be the best at hitting the gym everyday or avoiding sweets and curse words – but so far I have lived with purpose, and for that I feel content.

One of the strangest (and sometimes dangerous) things that happens to me when I travel is that, as soon as I overcome the fear of releasing the comforts of home and board the plane, I magically lose all inhibitions.   On my first volunteer trip, to East Africa in 2007, I was newly engaged to be married and about to go to Uganda and Tanzania – alone – for nearly three months.  It was not easy at all, and trust me, I’m no tougher than the next girl.  In fact, I still remember very vividly saying goodbye to my now-husband Matt, at LAX, in tears as an unimaginable aura of anxiety consumed the both of us.  If you had told me in that moment that four weeks later, I would step foot in the most volatile and war-torn part of the D.R. Congo, a region called North Kivu, to go see the endangered mountain gorillas at Virungas National Park, I would have frozen with disbelief.  But being so far removed, living in southwestern Uganda, it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.  A week after my quick trip in and out of the DRC, the BBC ran a cover story on several gorillas that were killed by rebels in that very same national park.  The killings had taken place the day after I left.

To get to Ayacucho, Peru, in the Central Andes, is a nine-hour nauseating bus ride from Lima that is absolutely not for the faint of heart.  It can be done overnight, which is what most people do.  I myself have made the trip six times now.  But if you told me I had to get on a nine-hour windy bus from San Diego six times in two months, I would be on Expedia searching for flight alternatives faster than you could say ‘let go of comfort.’

These two stories illustrate what I treasure the most about living abroad.  Something happens to my mind where I just let go of any premonitions or habits I was in, and roll with it.  I think that’s when you see personal transformations start to happen.  You really don’t have to go sky-diving or eat guinea pig.  If you break your norms in any way, you are transforming the way in which you see things, sometimes without even being aware of it.  And it’s an addiction to that learning which keeps me stepping on planes, pushing myself further, even as I’m scared senseless about taking the leap and letting go of home.