Peru: interview with Professor Marcos Agurto

[00:00:00] >> [MUSIC] [00:00:04] Why don't we put, working together, kids from the United States that have a different perspective from the world, kids from Peru? which are closer to the development problems that we study in a typical development class. My name is Marcus Agurto. I am professor in economics at the University of Piura in Peru. [00:00:20] The first thing that I should emphasize is that they are closer to each other like the Blacksburg students, me, my students, the Piura students. You know, that's part of the transformation process that they've been close to people from different realities. The second part that I think it's important is that they have been exposed to situations that are common in the developing world and that need a solution. [00:00:41] So that basically influences you and what I've seen from these kids is that they have started thinking about these problems and they have started thinking about how to provide solutions to these problems. You know it's not only the lectures and the theory. It's the close experience, too, and then you can put the two things together. [00:00:59] You know you get into an area and you would say, well, the solution is to build a whole house with these characteristics, right? And sometimes that takes time and the funds are not available. But you can make like short-term solutions that can alleviate serious problems. So basically the university is exploring right now the type of techniques that they used to have in these areas. [00:01:24] It's building constructions that are using these native materials, these native construction techniques to provide spacious houses with a lot of illumination, that's right, that can be afforded by these people and that can be easily maintained. You know this this implies that we have to work closely with the communities to understand the kind of houses that they want. [00:01:44] And if they want to get into the you know into the development field, this is the kind of life that you should expect, traveling to countries where there are problems being caused by these kind of situations and propose solutions. It's been a small exercise of what being a development economist is. [00:02:01] Hopefully they will get a good taste from this and will try to, you know, work on this in the future. We'll see!