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.

 

RPRS – The next trendy professional career

Many people are pleasing wondered by the way Peru’s President Martín Vizcarra is managing the crisis caused by Covid-19, the new corona-virus’ strain, at the point that everything seems to be under control. Seems. Well, the fact is all the decisions and protocols are not Vizcarra’s creation, not Ministers Board’s, not the prospective team’s, not advisors’, not shamans’, not gurus’.

The Law 29664 was passed in 2012, that instructs how to manage and to prevent the risky scenarios nationwide. Also, it creates the National Center for Prevention, Estimation, and Reduction of Disasters Risk, Cenepred ias in Spanish, that depends on the Prime Minister’s Office, PCM as in Spanish, that also manages the National Institute of Civile Defense, Indeci as in Spanish. Those three organizations have contingence plans, stores full of relief, and money coming from different social programmes, that was saved for emergency cases.

It’s not about I’m undeserving Vizcarra. Unlike, we are lucky about Peru has already warned to design an action plan, and what the President is doing now is to follow it up. In simple words, that’s called forecast, the action to fast forward the facts, skill we are not made ours, judging our reckless attitude at the time to measure future risks, attitude that becomes bothering beggar when we realize to be amid them.

“Peru comes preparing for different types of disaster 8 years ago,” one of my followers underlined while explaining this fact. The issue, and here it comes the apparent sensation of disorder and annoyance, is that Cenepred activates even provided the regional or local governments request it. My source assured me that none of them has staten nor consulted how to perform it as the crisis has happened. And when I’m talking of performing, I’m not meaning to perform like a costumed soldier even, when I were a mayor )a civile authority).

That would explain why everybody has the impression that Vizcarra and his crew are the action heroes, while our nearbiest authorities are appearing as the most uncapable never chosen. Well, they do, don’t they? Talking on a posible reason for the regional and local governments have not claimed to Cenepred, my source said the answer is simple – they mostly ignore it. I confess I’m also dismissed this detail, but… I’m not an authority.

Each quake, a new institution

Just to make history, Cenepred was created after the fiasco meant by the Fund for the South Reconstruction, the controversial Forsur as in Spanish, founded after the Pisco’s Earthquake, August 15^th, 2007, that left 550 casualties. And it seems somebody has to shake us the soil for we to shake our brain. If not, let’s get back a little more.

May 30th, 1970 – A terrible earthquake erased Yungay, Áncash, out of the map, left around 70,000 casualties according to the official toll. As a consequence, the military government  created Indeci (then, the National System of Civile Defense), and since that time, a doctrine was established – the top local officer, or state’s (regions today), or nation’s turns into the chief of every civile defense system, according to the geographic extension of the emergency. That was in 1972.

And as every rule has an exception, the South Vulcanological Observatory, OVS as in Spanish, depending on the Geophysical Institute of Peru, is a management example that would be worthy to study and reply. It has pages after pages with risk maps, action protocols in case of some volcano between Arequipa and Tacna decides to erupt. The most active ones are under 24/7 surveillance (that can be followed real- time on an open-access website), and it constantly moves local authorities through simulations and contingence plans that currently are used in the eruptive processes of Sabancaya and Ubinas Mounts.

In this point, I dreamed this week of an El Niño Warning Center located in Paita, Piura, like the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii Islands, or the Hurricane Warning Center in Florida, both in the U.S. The first entity is the reference for the Asia-Pacific Rim when a 7-magnitude or larger quake breaks and can cause troubles in our shores, while the second one is the mandatory information source every summer across the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Our warning center could be worldwide because El Niño impacts around the planet, and the reason why Paita is because two large water flows of our enormous ocean, warm and cold, meet very near there. I hope that comes true. Let’s continue.

Then, if our frame-protocol gathers almost half a century old and the most specific one is going to be a decade old, why do the mayors and regional governors suffer from nervous collapse and subsequent rigor morbidus every time they have to manage a disaster to prevent or to mitigate? Short answer: a lot of ego, a few neurone.

More than guessing, it’s about forecasting

And that is the ethernal Peruvian error – a mostly reactive instead of proactive system because it doesn’t know to read the past at the point it becomes to convince it will never happen anymore, but it also doesn’t know to fast forward the future and the multiple choices it represents, even the weirdest. Look at the crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic: we have usually live next to in-progress diseases, but any strucked us fully as a country, discounting to hold us inside our homes for a month and a half.

But as every crisis means and opportunity, this is the time a career I don’t know if exists, and if not we can create it here, should raise bonds – Response Planning for Risk Scenarios, or RPRS, what its name says, it’s in charge of think pretty detailed how we mitigate, avoid, and manage every bad it could happen because of measurable or unmeasureable contending situations .

The RPRS Officer has to be a person with a pretty wide vision but also a teaching ability to explain easily everybody, especially the authorities, about what could happen if nobody acts and how to act for it happens the less or null damage as possible. It’s not the person who avoids a black cat or eludes to pass under stairs, but it’s capable to anticipate how the cat will react and has got available stairs just in case of going to rescue it.

But nota all remains in vision and teaching, it has to be a person whom gets not boring to research in the reality of territory to serve (yes, knowledge on geography, history, statistics, sociology, and psychology are just part of the profile) and write everything down in a compulsively sequential way. Definetly, if you never learned to make flow diagrams, you won’t work on this career.

And the better of RPRS comes here – it will not be only a key career in public management, which the authority’s decisions –theoretically—influence on the life of thousands or millions of people. It also will be required by the private sector, non-profit or commercial, to guarantee if any investment faces unseen potential peril as well as to evaluate if the development projects are actually going to develop something or they will be another money waste just for granting a job to a hand of people.

And still beyond, taking the New Peruvian’s paradigm launched by President Vizcarra, it has to be a person with much empathy and creativity to promote the solidarian spirit among pairs and dispairs. Yes, it has to be a leader with a wide recognizement among the community, but also to be anyone else amid all the persons.

If you see your profile fits this one I describe, go preparing because you’re going to be required in the short-term. If you’re reading me from an university, an institute, a school, or similar, go considering to launch this course, that mixes humanism and science, hard work and pedagogics, communicability and reflection capability.

As I said to a colleague, the future of many proffessions, the mine one included, is they are going to upgrade new setups what are not that we used to know, and that’s a signal of times. Everything changes, and this crisis is underlining it and marking light yellow to us every hour, every minute, every second, and it demands an answer from us. Not asking it would be committing suicide… or another genocide.

And talking about colleagues, I leave you my tutorial for covering news during natural disasters that you can adapt to this crisis for good. Meet me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn for continuing to talk about.

55 years of rock in Piura

From playing the alien to the own – from face-to-face to the virtual platform.

 

The rock is a music genre that came out from a cultural mix in the United States as well as United Kingdom. Such disparate rhythms like the blues, the jazz, or the country were the ingredients those were used amid 20^th century for bringing the rock & roll to life, and starting from it, one decade later, to go configuring the rock like a cultural movement that globalized, even before the first Arpanet transmission, the predecessor of Internet,so far as 1969.

 

The Groove could arrive into Piura in 1967, although only covers were initially played. The experienced was not a brise but a blizzard. “More than 80 bands appeared,” Juan Francisco Facundo Silva, 43, tells me. He is one of the few genre’s advocates, at least in the two largest cities of Piura Department.

 

“I’m talking you about 1960s and 1970s like Scarface, The Delfines, The Jailers, The stones,” he remembers quoting an investigation by Miguel Almeida, who reached to systematize the movement’s beginning in Piura, in a over-30-page essay, just in case somebody wishes to go in-depth.

 

From the cover to the streaming

When the shocking 1980s ended,the Piura-based bands left to play borrowed themes and they dedicated to create their own ones. “Now,in 1990s, there is a milestone – for example, bands what made their own music like Libre and Diáfano, and the 2K already came in much later with bands like The Shokekoks, 1900,that are still struggling, and there were more,” Facundo goes on.

 

That time, almost every province’s capital city had, at least,one formation dedicated to the rock, like The Sepultureros, in Ayabaca City, that started to play circa 1995. It also started the division into sub-genres with so much diverse influences like the ska or the punk. The to pogue verb (dancing collectively by a friendly push) began to be part of the youth’s vocabulary of Piura.

 

Since 2010 up to now, there are new bands and new challenges to compete in a world what seems to leave step by step behind the classic media like the vinil (although it resists to die), the compact cassette (that already have disappear almost at all), the compact disc (that survives hard-working), and delivers up to the casting at the virtual cloud through the streaming, migration accelerated  after the Covid-19 pandemic

, that forced to close the public places for one entire year.

 

Facundo himself had to go through the FM-broadcasting until creating his own Facebook page, Facundo Rock, that dedicates long editions to present themes, groups, and analyzing the rock frame with interactions inside and outside Peru, inclusive. Some users follow him from furthest sites like Australia.

 

Self-managed movement

“Nowadays, the problem is there’s no support by regional governments,”  the presenter criticizes. “There are places that are closed like Piura Municipal Theater, Manuel Vegas Castillo Theater, also the Acoustic Shell (of Miguel Cortés Children Park] that requires to fix for cultural & sports events.”

 

After 55 years the first rock band played in Piura, even the district’s capital cities have theaters or stages especially built for  shows. In other words, there is much offer and the demand seems not to have decreased despite the urban genre looks like to have drowned it worldwide.

“Mostly, who  dedicate to make events or sessions are the independent people who like the rock – the bands themselves also self-manage but they are few,” Facundo explains.

 

The independent funding model  with private facilities is based upon the owner gains from sales of food and drinks, the producer gains from the box office. If the show is made for free and outdoors, like Facundo made in Sullana, October 15^{th (to celebrate  the}  Facundo Rock’s 2^nd anniversary), the public support basically consists in allowing the use of the place (in this case, the Convention Center’s amphitheater). The rest is gotten through sponsorship.

 

What is clear, in fact, is that amid this half-a-century of rock in Piura, the teenagers and youth of that time are this generation’s grandparents. And, very despite the cultural, technological  evolution,they have eased the seed follows growing, giving fruits.

 

The challenge for the rock in Piura is understanding that, not quitting to be a relatively marked local place, today has better chances than 55 years ago for becoming global. There’s talent – let’s see how much it’s able to shine.