The wrong year
Gilbert Klumpenaar, third-year student International Business and Languages at the faculty of Economics and Management in Arnhem, does his traineeship at a big international agrarian company in Lima, Peru.
The wrong year
There I am, 10,500 kilometers away in a strange environment where people speak Spanish with a pace of 120 kilometers an hour. With an average temperature of 27 degrees, most people would say that I shouldn’t complain. That is of course true, except when there is this appearing phenomenon called El Niño. Daily life doesn’t profit from this phenomenon because normally it is very sunny here, and now it is not at all. Because of a warm current in the ocean, the Peruvian coast water is warmed up. Because of this heating, the fishing-season is over, but that’s not the only thing. This warm current causes the development of more and more clouds. These clouds form a blockage for the sun, by which the atmospheric humidity becomes very high, at the moment it is approximately 99 per cent. Very sticky. You get overwhelmed by the heat if you’re active.
El Niño doesn’t appear every year, but once in five to seven years. I obviously chose the wrong year. El Niño has great influence on nature in Peru. Because of the warm currents the fish move to cooler areas in the sea. This means that birds like pelicans don’t have enough food and die with thousands together. The local fishermen will probably have problems too, because the fish cannot easily be caught in the deeper parts of the sea.
All in all, I may not complain when I compare the weather to Holland, but I can tell you all that these conditions here are not very pleasant either!
