I find myself standing in what I think is a house, complete with four stone walls and a door. The ground is complete dirt, but compacted so much that it acts just like cement. There is nothing on the walls except a few calendars that all happen to be the wrong year. One tells me it is January 2008, the other tells me it’s March 2010 (which was a good month that year) and another tells me all of the months in the year 2006. (You know, the last page of every calendar has those) There is one table in the room and what I think is a toy truck for the little boy playing in the dirt, which doubles as the living room floor. It’s sad, but expected.
We are walking through, the slums, ghetto, outskirts, whatever name you want to give it, that’s what it is because there is no official name for where we are. All the houses look like this one. In fact, this one is nicer than most. It has a window on the roof to let light in and there is a TV. I sit down on a chair Anna (our new amiga from Compassion International) gives me. We talk to a couple of the ladies in the room while Anna’s coworker fills out some papers about the kids. I’m not exactly sure what the papers are for but I think it is some kind of tracking system to make sure the families get what they are supposed to get, enough rations of food and water, those types of things.
We leave the house and walk to many others, stopping occasionally to say hola to children. I want to say they play in the streets but there are no streets. Everything is sand. It’s like I’m in a movie like Slumdog Millionaire or something. Except there were cars there I think, maybe not in slums…I don’t remember. But, there are no cars, no roads and no sources for food really. Not in this place anyway. The children in the “streets” play with balls or animals. One kid was running up to say hi holding a dog that probably was mixed with 6 or 7 breeds. I have no idea what type of dog it even could have resembled. They were both adorable though, the dog and the little boy.
We were told not to bring our cameras with us because it was too dangerous but I really wish I would’ve had mine to capture the smile on this child’s face. If I were him, I would probably be crying because as a child, I was dependant on my toys, clothes, food, friends, everything really. I get a really weird feeling walking through this area. I’m amazed at where I am…I wasn’t expecting Peru to be this poor. I’m still in shock that I am walking in sand, looking up at sand dunes the size of mountains (I actually mistook a sand dune for a mountain) and walking towards trash dumps basically. It’s such a beautiful horror. I want to sit in the middle of the “road” and just take picture after picture and watch all the kids play contently with nothing but the animals around but obviously, I need to keep up with Anna and make sure we get to stop at every house on the list. I hope we can do this more often and meet more people. I want to go back to the dunes.
