By ROGER HAMILTON

Corca is typical of communities throughout the Peruvian Andes, where an estimated 1.6 million extremely poor people have been largely bypassed by Peru's otherwise remarkable economic recovery.

Part of the problem is the bad state of local roads. Mostly dirt, sometimes etched into virtual cliffs, their surfaces are hammered to pieces by heavily laden trucks and buses, or swept away altogether when water-saturated hillsides break free, sending down hundreds of tons of mud and stone. As a result communities are cut off from markets, health services and schools.

Pavia was hired by Peru's transport ministry as part of a nation-wide program financed by the IDB and the World Bank to improve and rehabilitate 7,500 kilometers of rural roads and 2,200 km of secondary roads and establish systems for their maintenance. The object of the program was to reduce rural poverty and induce people who had fled to the cities during the years of civil unrest to return home.

Before the program, it had never been clear who was responsible for constructing, improving and maintaining Peru's rural roads. Most of the funds budgeted for road projects had been earmarked for capital investments, not maintenance. Local governments did not have the resources to carry out projects on their own.

Paiva's assignment was to organize microenterprises in communities served by rehabilitated roads to maintain these same roads. Although a highway engineer might see only problems in such a scheme, anthropologist Paiva saw things differently. He understood that the Indian communities, poor though they were, had a rich body of traditions that included the minka, or group work.

Dating back to pre-Inca times, the custom of the minka remains an important cooperative means for carrying out agricultural work, explained Paiva. When a farmer's irrigation canals need fixing, or a field needs harvesting, the work is done jointly. Paiva would help the communities apply the minka tradition to road maintenance.

Paiva arrived in Corca in 1995, equipped only with a backpack. Although he spoke Quechua, he was an outsider, and the people treated him as such. But over the next three months he worked with them in the fields, ate with them, lived with them, and so gained their confidence. "As an anthropologist, I didn't look at the problem from just a technical standpointhow to clean out drainage ditches, for example--but as a product of all of the human interrelationships in the community that have to do with the job of maintaining the road," said Paiva.

In the end, the seven communities bordering the road organized a microenterprise (although the people insisted on calling it a "committee" since they were already familiar with the term), each community naming representatives. The committee designates the 12 men that make up the maintenance crew at any one time. The crew works daily, regrading the surface and cleaning out ditches, and the workers are paid by the government. Eventually, the government hopes to finance community enterprises whose profits would support road maintenance when the current project ends.

"It's important to understand that we did not impose this system on them," said Paiva. "They identified their own needs and organized themselves."

Today, trucks hauling potatoes, fava beans and wheat can make the trip to Cuzco in just one hour, rather than the previous three, ensuring better prices to the producers. Buses are making regular runs and the government is providing potable water systems and schoolhouses, and soon, electric power. Even tourists are starting to come, drawn by the area's natural attractions and pre-Inca paintings.

Paiva takes pride in the community's accomplishments. "It took a long time," he said, "but it was not difficult; it was a pleasure."

-- Reported by David Mangurian and Jorge Zaveleta, Peru