Heading to Germany

During the first week of June I'm off to Germany where I have been invited to attend a conference about volunteers.  I will also be visiting the offices of Freunde der Erziehungskunst Rudolf Steiners to talk about our Estrella del Sur projects in Peru and to thank them for helping us make the step of aquiring a building site for our new center in Sauce.  This help was in the form of an interest-free loan.  We are really happy to finally get a place of our own that we can shape into a very welcoming educational and social center for the community.

 Here are our volunteers from Germany, Andreas and Freya, in front of our newly aquired building site in Sauce.  It measures 11 meters wide by 20 meters deep and is one block away from the lake.  It is a different site than the one we first looked at back in February.  We had problems with the price which kept going up. The new site is just a few meters away and is better in that it has a large sports area behind it which will give the children more room to play.
We would like to thank our friends who responded to our appeal for help to buy a permanent home for Estrella del Sur.  Shortly we will start remodeling this traditional jungle-style building using funds kindly donated by various friends to double its size to create a classrom space.  We also plan to build two bedrooms for our volunteers, a bathroom with shower, a kichen and dining area, gardens, a playground and a covered area for woodworking and other crafts such as candlemaking.
We welcome visitors.
We also welcome the donation of more funds so we can complete our remodeling project.

We have recently started  Friday workshops for senior citizens 60 to 80 years old from 3-5 pm which is attended by 20 people.  We offer weaving, embroidery, knitting and other crafts.  We encourage participants to tell their personal stories and it has been interesting to find out more about 'the old days' when Sauce was a much more isolated place and there was a lot more magic.  Several report seeing mermaids in the lake when they were younger, also balls of fire, which is likely because the whole area is seismically active and it seems to have been more so in the past.  After a glass of fruit juice and a piece of cake the participants go off home happy.  This is the first such gathering offered in Sauce for older people.  Lourdes is glad to have all these new friends.

Help us buy our Waldorf community outreach building!

 When Lourdes (who is currently back in Cusco teaching a Waldorf education course to new teachers) and I first moved to Sauce some months back we were kindly lent this humble building with adobe walls and a dirt floor to use as a classroom for our Waldorf-based educational and community outreach program.
Recently the owner, who is the director of one of the local primary schools, told us that he has decided to put it up for sale.
Hey folks!  We'd like to buy it.  Can you help?
As they say, there are three important factors when buying real estate:  Location, location and location.  This building and adjoining garden space has all three.  Many people have expressed that Laguna Azul is one of the most beautiful spots in Peru and this property is one block back from the lakeshore.
Once we have become owners we can remodel and transform the structure into something much better for our purposes and make the garden into a beautiful play area for the children.
The lot is 300 square meters (about 900 sqare feet) and is selling for 40,000 Soles (Peru's national currency) which translates as $15,000 US at today's exchange rate.
We would love for anyone who would like to support the foundation of a new kind of Waldorf-based initiative, not a school, but a center for artistic and academic life enrichment for children and youth living close to the bottom on the social totem pole to come together and give us a hand to raise this amount.
Unfortunately there is the possibility the property will be sold to another buyer which would leave us looking for another place to start afresh.  That is not a scenario we want as we have already invested somewhat in painting the building, doing some repair work and putting in a new cement floor.  We would love to stay and make the place even better for the years to come.
We envision this as a pilot project which will hopefully provide a new model to inspire others to begin similar ventures in other communities.  The emphasis on arts and handwork is to engage the right hemisphere of the brain and provide some balance in worldwide education which increasingly only focuses on left brain processes.  The aim is to support the emergence of balanced human beings.
This project also provides a venue for young volunteers from the developed world to come and have a life-changing experience.
If you would like to make a donation large or small please contact me at  martinstevens@juno.com 
Thank you!

Sailing/rowing skiff

Steel rudder

Skiff with shallow-draft keel

Because I'm presently all wrapped up in building our house in Sauce I have had to put my large sailing catamaran project on hold temporarily.  In the meantime I had the notion to have a 17 foot wooden skiff built by a local boat builder which I would then adapt for sail and rowing.  So far I have added a shallow-draft keel with steel rudder to the bottom which I have also fiberglassed to prevent wood borers entering and then painted the exterior.

Home made oars

Next step will be to turn the boat over, paint the inside and fit out with seats, a tiller, mast, boom, oars and oarlocks.
It won't be winning any prizes for speed but rowing it will be good excercise and it should remain pretty flat when sailing in a blow.  Lots of weight below.....

Our new dock with renovated dugout canoe

Talking 2012 subterranean homesick blues

Lourdes and I were kindly invited to stay at the marvellous peruvian beach town of Huanchaco from Dec 26 until Jan 2 by our friends Dan and Donna Factor from Venice Beach California.  We generally had a great time but for some reason not entirely clear we all felt bummed out at the big moment of midnight Dec 31 2011 as we watched thousands of Peruvians celebrating the passing of the old year with fireworks and alcohol as pulsing techno-cumbia music filled the night.
Why did I feel so low, I asked myself the next day.
No conclusive answer came, except this:  I've had the year 2012 on my personal psychic radar screen since the mid 1980's when I read Jose Arguelles' 'The Mayan Factor' and later tuned in to the ravings of the late philosopher/celtic bard Terrance McKenna.  Something indefinable woke in me on the intuitive level  25 years ago that there was something stirring, a ripple in the cosmic fabric of the arc of time.  Perhaps humanity had reached a portal, a time-nexus, after which nothing would ever be the same again.
For what had I witnessed in my own brief stay on this planet but some kind of near-culmination of the historical process?  An acceleration during my own lifetime of unimaginable proportions in technology and corresponding changes in the collective human psyche. Perhaps a headlong rush towards oblivion.  Perhaps not.......
But maybe what I hadn't counted on was the continuation of banality.  Maybe my low state at midnight Dec 31 2011 was an unconscious reaction along the lines of, what? more of this crap, can't we get beyond techno-cumbia and beer as a species?  Time will tell on that one......

'Tis the season

Here's sending out heartfelt best wishes to our family and friends at this time of solstice, Christmas and New Year's from the Amazon region of Peru where Lourdes and I, with help from our volunteers from Germany, Freya and Andres, are working to establish a Waldorf-inspired community outreach program in the small town of Sauce.

We have fourty children attending our classes which offer a mixture of help with academic subjects as well as arts and crafts offerings such as painting, sewing, macrame, knitting and weaving.  This is a region where traditional handicrafts have all but died out so it feels good to be redressing that loss in a small way.
Please see our Estrella del Sur page on Facebook for more information and pictures.  Link is at right >

The jungle catamaran project is on hold for a few months as I am working on building our house, cafe, classroom and workshop building. But in the interim I'm finishing a 16ft sailing/rowing skiff which will hopefully soon be launched.  After some early holdups and obstacles the house building project is going forward quite well now and should have a roof completed in the next few weeks.

There's a great view of Laguna Sauce for me as I work up high installing rafters and roofing.

This is my first large construction project in Peru and it has been a challenge to find good suppliers of materials.  You can't just go down to the local Home Depot here.  I had one recommended supplier of wood swindle me out of a substantial sum of money but now I have found a reliable and honest guy who has so far got me everything I need.  Then there has been trouble finding a good 'maestro', a building contractor to do brick and cement work.  Again several unreliable ones but now I have one who shows up and is doing a great job.  After over 35 years in the construction trades I've seen all this before in the US and Britain, the world of  building contractors is just plain full of unreliable characters and it's always great to finally find good ones.  The great thing here is; no building inspectors and no codes, I just build the way I feel and it's funky jungle-style here in the tropical mode.

Estrella del Sur, Star of the South

I spent the decade prior to meeting Lourdes waking up to certain painful realities, namely that our western industrial culture is fundamentally insane and unsustainable.  Furthermore it is based on an economic system predicated on death and slavery in that the  three most profitable business ventures for the worldwide elite are 1. Arms dealing, 2.Drugs, both legal and illegal, 3. Human trafficking (source: Amnesty International).

When Lourdes and I got together in 2006 we decided to pool our resources and do something, however seemingly insignificant, to provide a countercurrent to the social insanity of our modern world, starting with educational assistance for children and young people and deriving our inspiration from the worldwide Waldorf alternative educational movement.  Consequently we set up the legal non-profit entities of Estrella del Sur in Peru and Star of the South as a state level non-profit corporation in Oregon, USA.
During our five years in Cusco Estrella del Sur began its work by acting as a vehicle to receive international volunteers who worked with us in projects outlined below in previous entries on this blog.

Now we have made the step of purchasing two plots of land in Sauce where our organization can have a permanent base from which to operate.  We are in the process of building a small classroom, woodwork shop and bathroom but in the meantime we have been provided with this humble building with dirt floors and no bathroom from which to begin our educational and social community outreach program here.  Our volunteers from Germany, Lena, Annalena and Marieke have done a great job in painting and getting the space ready for classes.  There will be handwork, art and help with academic subjects for primary age children, a twice weekly playgroup for pre-schoolers, English classes for children and adults as well as woodcarving.
Oh and thank you for the items you sent us.  The monkey and the plywood violin were particularly useful.

The jungle catamaran Skydancer

As a lifelong sailor and boatbuilder it is exciting for me to be now living on the shore of a beautiful lake in the western Amazon basin after five years spent high and dry up at 10,000 feet in the peruvian Andes.  After Lourdes and I made the decision to move from Cusco to Laguna Azul my thinking naturally turned to, what shall I do for a boat?
I checked out used sailing boats in Peru's capital Lima but the offerings were few and laughably expensive.  Which led me to consider building my own.  Then I had a thought; what if I used two of the long, narrow wooden hulls of the typical amazonian  river craft as the basis for a catamaran?  I knew the resulting boat wouldn't be very fast or go upwind well but speed on a 3 mile long lake wasn't necessary and a small auxilliary outboard motor could be used as a 'third sail' when going to windward.  It would for sure make a nice stable platform for lake cruising with the option of anchoring and letting people go kayaking, fishing, swimming etc.
Needing a source of income in our new location it seemed to me that offering sailing catamaran cruises on Laguna Azul could be the ticket to long term livelihood and warrant the time and expense needed for such a project.  It would come under the now fashionable banner of eco-tourism and be something of a novelty as the only large sailing craft in the region.
Having made the decision to go ahead with this boat building project, I made a few design scetches and had a local boatbuilder make two identical 30ft hulls from the dense and rot-resistant wood ana.  I then added two shallow draft keels to their flat undersides. This elicited much curiosity at my lakeside building area and I had to constantly explain the rudiments of lateral resistance to dockside loafers and passers by.  Most people in the Amazon region have never seen a sailing boat.  All nautical propulsion here is either by paddle or motor.  A boat pushed along by the breeze is a highly novel concept although a few thousand kilometers to the south their fellow countrymen at Lake Titicaca have been using sailing craft for fishing and transport since antiquity.
Upon hearing that the lifespan for a typical wooden boat here is 8 to 10 years I decided to coat the bottom of my hulls with fiberglass to prevent marine bugs from chewing through the planks.  This would also have the advantage of stopping the wood becoming waterlogged and save an estimated 20% weight in the hulls.  Finding the stuff in Peru however proved to be a challenge, but as I Ching say, 'perseverance furthers' and I eventually ran the materials down in a dodgy part of Lima.
At the time of writing I have fiberglassed the hulls in the area below the waterline and painted the topsides a bright yellow, experimenting with the paint sold for making lines on asphalt streets, my reasoning being that it must be a pretty tough paint to adhere to asphalt and stand up to being driven over by trucks.  That and it only costs just a bit more than regular exterior paint and hundreds less than real marine paint.  It comes in any color you want as long as that's day-glo yellow or white.

I built the first Phil Bolger-designed 'Micro' back in the early '80s in Miami, a boat billed as the biggest 16ft pocket cruiser available.  There are now hundreds of them around the world and it is a tried and true design.  For my jungle catamaran I decided to use the same mainsail design which is a loose-footed affair with a light boom tensioned by a snotter line.  (Sorry non-sailing folk, we are getting into boring technical jargon here). It also has vertical reefing with a line of reef points going up parallel with the mast.  In a blow the boat can be reefed in 30 seconds:  Head to wind, ease the snotter line, haul the reef line, haul the snotter line and bear away.  It certainly worked well on that Phil Bolger design and I've had Lee Sails in Hong Kong make my new bigger mainsail with the same feature as well as a conventional hanked-on jib from rather light sailcloth as winds are mostly quite modest here.  I'm doubtful if the sails will ever see 20 knots.
What to do for a mast?  Well a high-tech aluminium jobby is out of the question, how about a tree?  Plenty of those around here deforestation notwithstanding, problem is they mostly don't grow absolutely straight for 12 meters/ 40 feet.  But eventually we tracked one down.  It's a little on the spindly side but I think with a little extra standing rigging it will be OK.  Time will tell on that one.  Rather than use sail track I've had the notion to use some 1/2 in plastic water pipe surrounded by a wooden casing up the mast to accept the bolt rope of the mainsail.  This whole project is seat-of-the-pants engineering using locally available materials, the only exception being a bag-full of running rigging hardware I picked up in a chandlery when I was over in England in March.  The only thing I forgot was to pick up a small red ensign for the shrouds, so if any brit is heading this way please just jolly well pop one in the old suitcase, what?
I have just applied to the local powers that be for permission to build a wooden jetty a short distance away from our building site where I am beginning to build our multipurpose woodshop/classroom/house/cafe.  Hopefully it will soon be approved after which I plan to turn my hulls right side up, launch them and build the platform structure connecting them alongside my new dock in shallow water.  The big challenge will be refraining from dropping tools in the water!  Especially plugged-in electrical ones.  Arrrghh!!
Stay tuned for future updates on this project.
I can be reached at   martinstevens@juno.com