Tag Archives: Peru

Making friends in Peru

As a veteran participant of the NGO Amigos de las Americas in Honduras, Panama and the Dominican Republic, I was used to walking into host communities and being offered piles of food, a place to sleep, a drink. I was used to finding three, sometimes four, host families per community. You could say that I was very much accustomed to a certain level of acceptance – immediate, welcoming, hospitable, generous acceptance. This meant that I was also not very accustomed to having to think too hard about why I was being accepted, or even if I should be accepted in the places where I was asking for food, housing, protection for two or three volunteers for a period of two months. People were nice, I was nice, they said yes, I said thank you, what was there really to think about?

This all worked very well until I went to Peru, where everything was suddenly flipped on its head. And here is where I want to talk about one of the struggles I faced conducting research in indigenous Peru.

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A community asamblea in Peru
Photo credit: Claudia Behnke

Since I’ve mentioned it in previous posts, I thought I would give a brief description of what a community asamblea is and why it is so important in Cusco and for my organization, Amigos de las Americas.

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host community in Cusco, Peru

When I first started my research on turismo vivencial, or homestay tourism, I thought that Amigos de las Americas, the NGO I work for, was correct to not pay host families in cold hard cash for hosting volunteers for a summer. According to the traditional AMIGOS model, host families agree to house and occasionally feed volunteers for two months.  In return, the volunteers work on behalf of the community. In most places, this means the volunteers hold educational activities and organize the community to support a development project funded in part by AMIGOS. In our Peruvian communities, this also meant that the volunteers did manual labor for various people in the community. Ideally, the entire community benefits from hosting the volunteers.

In addition, the theory goes that not paying host families benefits the volunteers by weeding out any family that would agree to host a volunteer just for the money. Since volunteers are sometimes as young as 15 years old, AMIGOS wants to select families who will act as families and provide cultural exchange, support and guidance during the summer. The idea is that if you don’t pay someone, they must be doing it out of the kindness of their heart and not for monetary gain.

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