Sullana – Healthy mind in healthy body?

Beginning 2013, the songwriter Javier Jofré was under much pressure – Reconnected, his album was amid the forge and he tried not to stress. “Perhaps someone has an eye closer the healthy, become awarest of the things, of environment, of what someone breaks out day after day… this record has a little bit of that,” he reflected.

 

Up to this date,Javier is 35 years old, 6 feet height, 165 pounds weight. He’s a fan of the soccer, basket, carting, and adventure sports. “It’s a routine to eat almonds, nuts, raisings, cereals, drink much water, I dismissed many flavorized juices I drank before, then I ever go to the gym and I work out my daily routine,” he told me.

 

As well as his physical and mental health, Javier cares the coherence of harmony and message although it costed him to be censored. Ending 2012, YouTube banned his song This Is Not because of an apparent violation of the community rules. The song criticizes the excesses of humankind and its cult to consumerism.

 

 

Looking at the net, Javier thought some of his songs could be staged in locations at the Chira Valley. The detail is he lives in Argentina. While I listen to him in Sullana City, the most important one bathed by the second most polluted river of Peru –according to Oxfam—, many people ignore if they are part of the statistics about non-transmittable physical and mental health conditions in the province, rather if there is such statistics.

 

At least, the mental health is actually mentioned on the Local Educational Project, and before the Covid-19 pandemic aggravated, the attempts to suicide and those reached to commit could be linked to cases of school stalking and bullying judging the testimonials of relatives and who survived for telling it. During the pre-pandemic age, some teachers complained that, although they want to correct the problem, they have the tied hands because “today we can’t touch the student.”

 

Some high-school senior students, who claimed to be bullying victims in an experimental advisory work, developed by FACTORTIERRA in 2010, told the stalking becomes real and endures because some teachers are part of that problem – intolerance to homosexuality. “But I’m not gay,” one of the guys, then 16 years old,  confessed to me. “what happens is as they see you are good mannered and peaceful, they think you’re a pussy.”

 

After that, he studied History and Cultural Management at a Piura City’s university. Unlike other dudes at his age, he doesn’t consume alcohol, smoke, do sports, and he almost didn’t attend to the discos. The most attended ones of Sullana City were the located on José de Lama Avenue’s 18^th square, Santa Rosa Bourgh, the meeting point for youth every weekend.

 

Because of a local resolution that forces the spree to finish at three in the morning, who wanted to continue it, bought alcohol and filled the park of López Albújar Bourh’s first zone.

 

This is the ‘sucesor’ of elba Cruz (formerly called Kumamoto) Park, Jardín Bourgh, where the neighborhood did all possible to scare spreers who woke up drinking alcohol, listening to the music totally aloud, and having sex within the shadows of the garden yards. Much music they listen to comes from Puerto Rico, a U.S. free-associated state, where the 2012 version of the Mental Health Handbook specifies that getting drunk, even occasionally, can be rated as alcoholism.

 

There were still dudes who went to spend overnight at Elba Cruz Park but less crowded. A truck of Sullana Province Municipality’s Communitarian Security tried to seize some beers to a bunch of college studs although some feet away, evident teenagers did the same but they were not touched.

 

Walking up 330 feet, there is a sports field, one of the most attended of Sullana Metro Area. During the pre-pandemic age, it was used to thunder the bourgh with parties in the open. There are around a hundred across the city. The youth –let’s convine the population between 15 and 35 years old—used those spaces to have fun and, in principle, to socialize.

 

It’s not the only sports infrastructure of the metro area. The emblematic stage is Campeones del 36 Stadium, unfinished for a long time after a lawsuit during the former Mayor Jaime Bardales administration, and up to date turned into a campaign hospital for moderate and severe Covid-19 patients. Inside the province, the situation of this infrastructure is mixing, according to the sports journalist Joe Navarro, host of Radio Nuevo Norte 860 Am’s Frecuencia Deportiva newscast.

 

“The stadium of Lancon’es already has a perimetrical wall, querecotillo’s has no advance, Salitral is one of the less supporters to sport, Marcavelica is building a 800-people tribune [wwith a rain drainage], Ignacio Escudero is making an integral project to improve progressively the Pablo Cruz Carrera Stadium, and Miguel Checa’s is one of the best sports stages,” he reviewed in 2013.

 

Paradoxically, Miguel Checa, just in Western Sullana, is the lowest available budget district but had the privilege to be the home of Talara’s Atlético Torino soccer team during the 2012 Peru Cup because its facilities were the best conserved across the province. For Navarro, the metro area has a bad rate – in fact, instead of running in Campeones del 36, many athletes prefer to work out in Huamán de los Heros Pier having the polluted Chira dam as a background.

 

On february 6th, 2013, Sullana Municipality announced it would recuperate that space and the next Turicarami Lane where is projected to build a amphitheater and even an open-air gym, and as the facilities don’t do sports but the people, I asked Joe for a list of highlighted athletes of the province. The exercise I proposed him mis dismissing the soccer because, as he says by himself, has much investment, so publicity.

 

Joe spent several seconds silent and him didn’t give me an answer. Looking for archives, I found two elementary school students made a difference in chess: José Antonio Díaz Moscol and Dennis Daniel Sánchez Herrera, with Del Norte School, wwere considered for the Piura Department team of the so-called science-sport.

 

One of Joe’s workmates, the radio producer James Ojeda has become, not wishing, a biking advocate. Between 1999 and 2019, supported by Nuevo Norte, launched Por Las Rutas De La Integración (On The Integration Routes), a caravan that looked to unite Peru and Ecuador as a homage to the 1998 Peace Agreement.

 

Then, I tried something new with Joe. If what has proliferated the most in Sullana are the gyms, why don’t we have more athletes? “To an amateur athlete results expensive to go to a gym – can’t pay for it,” he stressed. “You are never going to find a true athlete in there.” Those places have multiplied in the metro area. Just in Downtown Sullana, the only one was Hercules for 20 years. At this report’s deadline, FACTORTIERRA could count 5 remarkable ones.

 

Hercules was a Project started up by Félix Merino Luna on the third block of Jose de Lama Avenue beginning 1980s. Because it was a hit, he summoned his cousin Luis Lucho Bulnes Luna, then both began a promotion trail of physical culture and bodybuilding, that the second one continued.

 

Lucho, after being one of the first entering contests (in 1982 when the discipline wondered the people)is a freelance trainer now. In 2011, when Sullana was 100 years old as a province, he was recognized as the trainer of trainers. After leaving his cousin, Lucho moved to Piura Street, then 1^st Street, and finally Salaverry Bourgh.

 

Right there in 2002, a 20-year-old dude entered as is pupil, and because of his training as an army commando, became one of the most notable in Lucho’s Gym: Alfredo Rivera, who was the fourth runner in 2011 Mister Sullana, when Lucho was recognized, and ggot focused on the department circuit. “I need sponsorship… I’ve not found support yet,” told me who also became a trainer. He didn’t get it. Today, he lives and trains at the jungle of Cusco Department.

 

FACTORTIERRA contacted other trainers and athletes but the appointments were not possible, or it resulted that nobody knew nobody else.

 

Although he is also fan of the weights and barbells, the painter Fernando Chang, 40, was frustrated on his career like a soccer player when he was just 6 years old. “They said me I wouldn’t have anything by kicking a ball.” Despite, he had time to playonce a week and twice by exception, and working out at the gym or his home. “That takes me off the stress.”

 

When the time to choose a career came in, he was in Trujillo, La Libertad, and entered the Fine Arts school to develop his other talent – drawing aand painting. He pitches a most diverse proposal that is not centered in a particular style but it tries to express what he thinks the people prefer to ignore. “I fuse the classical with the abstract (…) I’m working on the marginal issue – my models are the street people, washing the cars, asking for charity. I work on the responsible parenthood concept,” he explains.

 

Chang has two key milestones in his career: to expose in Europe and to be one of the promoters with the first and only private permanent art gallery in Sullana – the lobby of Santa Rosa School which he is a former student. “I proposed [to Principal Brother Félix Saeta y Gutiérrez] to create an art gallery, he only said me – let’s do it,” he remembers.

 

He has taught drawing and painting for kids but that’s not what he has to deal with: “In arts, there is also prejudge and rejection… from other colleagues. Many people think the new ones don’t make art because we don’t follow up the trend.” The painter believes it’s a problem of ideosyncracy and he told me that in Trujillo, the so-called recognized artists end to be mentors of the new ones, a few spread practice in Piura.

 

Also, he says there is sponsorship from the private sector in that city. However, he feels there is a cultural evolution in Sullana, and despite, it is granted to the former province’s Mayor Jorge Camino Calle’s support (a discrete collector of art pieces). Chand is part of a community of almost one hundred plastic artists in the metro area those, in spite of becoming known and exposing to pay the bills, are separated.

 

In the case of a disperse and anonymous athletes community, the leagues –except soccer—don’t work, Joe Navarro observed, because of leadership troubles. For his partner James Ojeda, the problem is the absence of support: “When you go to knock on the doors as an athlete, you are not sponsored or it’s few, you knock on the doors and you dismotivate.”

 

While how the physical and mental health of people is statistically ignored, the field interventions will be purely inconsistent and declarative because it will not be anything real to hold on. The media don’t talk about this reality, although to express fairly, the late Sullana-native singer Michelly Portocarrero achieved to catch the national audience by imitating a famous colleague by her scandals instead of her big voice.

 

Almost nobody remembers that Lucy watanabe or eva Ayllón launched their careers in Sullana when the Feria de Reyes Song Festival was respected four decades ago. Amid that frame, Javier Jofré’s music is already listened in Piura (and Tambograndé in particular). Could his attention call against the indifference to environment and the own being flourish in Sullana?

 

With reports of Luis Correa and estany Tineo. The Committee of Young Councellors of Sullana Province collaborated to the production of this story. Photograph by Franco Alburqueque for FACTORTIERRA. Additional photographs were provided by Javier Jofré, James Ojeda, and Fernando Chang. © 2013 -2021 by Asociación Factor Tierra. All Rights Reserved.