Visiting a women's microenterprise bakery in the slums of Lima.
The floating reed island of Uros on Lake Titicaca.
Reed huts on the Island of Uros.
Watching the Americans get smoked at soccer by the Caritas Team, Puno.
Getting ready to head out on Lake Titicaca.
Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake.
The community of Azangaro that I worked in. A long, painful story about poverty at its worst.
Slaughtering one of their own sheep to feed the visiting students from LLU. It is a very rare event for them to eat their own livestock since they rely on selling them for their major bulk of their meager income. {See story below}
I´ve always considered myself a champ at ¨roughing it¨, that is until I came to the district of Azangaro. Azangaro finally tested my limits to the point of intolerance.
The village of Tupac Amaru sits at approximately 14,000 feet in the most desolate, isolated part of the Andes you´ll ever see. All four of us arrived after a 3-hour overcrowded ride from hell in a vehicle that bore likeness to a rickshaw taxi. The driver dumped us off in what appeared to be an adobe village that had been partially burnt to the ground and abandoned after all the glass had been shot out of the remaining buildings. He then warned us that we should only tell the villagers that we were there to work with the NGO Caritas, because terrorists occasionally passed through and had burnt the cheese factory down. Then he hit the gas as fast as he could and disappeared down the potholed, gravel road before we could scream, ¨Take us back!¨
The twenty-some families of Tupac Amaru solely survive off the land and their livestock. They make less than fifty cents/day and barely have enough food to feed the mouths of their own families let alone the mouths of four extra visitors whom they weren´t even expecting. Apparently there was some breakdown in communication between LLU, the Caritas organization, and the community itself and there was no accomodation planned for our visit. A couple of the ranchers or gauchos finally showed up and offered to let us sleep on the floor of the community shed for the night until they could scramble to find us homes to stay in. We asked where we could wash up and they showed us to a hole in a ground behind the shed where a thick algae community had overtaken the entire water supply. Bienvenidos.
In the meantime we were given a tour of the ¨community¨¨ which consisted of scattered adobe huts with straw thatched roofs, endless pastures of alpacas, cows, and sheep, and streams of contaminated water that fed the animals and watered the few crops they can grow: alfalfa, oat, potato, and chujno. Chujno, rotten potatoes that are soaked in contaminated water for 2 weeks and then laid out to rot in the sun, showed up at every meal. I was praying to get through just one meal without having to politely swallow another rotten chujno. Had I known what was to come, I would have been chowing down on the chujno.
The second morning, we were treated to breakfast at the health promoter´s home and were told that we were going to have sweet potatoes, chujno, and coca tea. I was grinning from ear to ear believing that I would finally escape a meal with mystery animal parts. I stopped grinning when I was handed a bowl of sweet potato, black chujno, and what appeared to be parts of both sheep intestine and testicle. The smell and the taste that had blended in with the rest of my potatoes just about did me in right then. I spooned all the wretched meat over to Wanjiru´s bowl while trying not to gag. (Note: She´s from Kenya and loves that stuff.) So I sat there sipping my mint tea and congratulating myself on making it through another sufferable meal, until the youngest daughter walked over dragging one of their sheep and the mother started sharpening her butcher knife on the stone slab right in front of me. I start panicing, ¨Oh dear god! They´re going to slaughter this sheep right in front of me! I´ve got to get out of here.¨ I headed for the fields while the mother bound the feet together, slit the lamb´s throat, broke the legs, and started to skin it right in the middle of their living area.
Later that afternoon, having been almost done in by the mystery meals, my greasy hair, filthy clothes, and the pervasive smell of slaughtered sheep and overflowing latrines, Yessenia and I were invited to spend the night at a singled mother´s hut. Thrilled to not spend another long 12-hour night on the shed´s floor that smelled entirely too flammable like propane, we jumped at the chance. We were shown to our adobe mud hut complete with a dirt floor, storage sacks of chujno and potatoes, and a small twin bed in the corner. Yessenia and I decided that it was worth it to roll out our sleeping bags and squish ourselves on the small bed together. The temperature dropped about 20 degrees and we resorted to getting in our sleeping bags at 3 pm and reading. About 10 miutes later, I felt something crawling under my sleeping bag in the straw mattress. Panicked, I sat up to find a rat looking down at me from a hole in the wall, and another rat running across the bed and onto the floor. Yessenia and I ran out of the hut screaming bloody murder for the Senora to come. She was nowhere to be found so we just kept running.
Later that night we were put up in a bed at our friend, the health promoter´s hut. About 1 am, I woke up horribly sick and was trapped under about 10 heavy saddle blankets that his wife had generously put on us to keep us from freezing . I felt like I was suffocating and I knew that I had to make it out of the hut as fast I could before I vomited. In my haste, I couldn´t get the door unlocked and when I finally did I smacked my head on the top of the adobe doorframe because they make their doors so small. I tumbled out of the hut and fell on the ground outside their door, which was finally the last straw that threw me into a fit of vomiting. The senora came out muttering and consoling in broken words of both Quechua and Spanish. I had no idea what she was saying, but she insisted on pouring me a capful of some concoction she had in her bedroom that tasted like windex and herbs. She then insisted on rubbing my stomach with a herb paste and tying blankets around my waist. I seriously thought that frigid hut would be my final resting place knowing that nearest health post was 20 miles away and couldn´t only be reached by mule or horse since no one owns a car or a telephone there.
That was our last night in Azangaro needless to say. After we taught all our health education sessions, completed our needs assessment, and ate the last slaughtered sheep they prepared for our departure, we caught the next car out of there yesterday afternoon.
We´re back here in Puno, at our ridiculous 5-star hotel, and I´m still haunted by that place but mostly by those beautiful, yet so impoverished people. They have absolutely nothing. Nothing. Yet they brought us in like family into their community and gave us the very best they could sacrifice. They´re not asking for hand-outs or pity, just for the opportunity to pay back a loan so they can cultivate their land or create more jobs. They were the hardest-working, most motivated people I´ve ever had the pleasure to meet.
Caritas has cut their program budget in that community for the next fiscal year and they will no longer train the health promoters after this year. Previously the health promoters had been given basic medical training but Caritas couldn´t afford to supply them with first aid kits. Knowing that this community only has a completely insufficient, undersupplied health post 20 minutes away and a health center 2 hours away, that is a pending death sentence.
This is what makes public health work so sobering, but yet endless in opportunity.
Continental Divide of the Andes.
Machu Picchu.
An inspiring story of innovative grassroots level healthcare. Acomayo, Peru.
