Juan Carlos, age 10, plays tour guide for us as we traipse behind him through his town, a labyrinth of dusty streets that creep uphill away from the park, el comedor (soup kitchen), and small school. He knows why we are here, his face expectant, eager to connect. Our visit is to the outskirts of Lima, which seems to stretch infinitely, expanding like a balloon about to burst. We know them as shantytowns, but the locals know them as home.
We’re accompanying a social worker from the PPA who’s visiting the home of Juan Carlos whose mother has applied for her son to live there. We’re along to see where the kids we’ve been teaching live. Mostly, the children stay at the PPA, but some go home on the weekends, an hour’s ride into the poorest sections of the city.
We stop first to talk to a mother who has heard we’re from the PPA. She has no money for her own house–even a house typical of the area cobbled together with tin and wood, brick and cardboard. She stays in a patchworked house of a neighbor a couple of rooms and a toilet (a hole) outside. She carries her baby everywhere and asks if she can send one of her children to the PPA. It’s hard to imagine that an orphanage here means opportunity with your own bed, three meals a day, and an education, all free. But she already has one child at the PPA, and there are rules about how many children from one family can attend.
Juan Carlos has been to the PPA–in fact, he recognizes Margo from the other day, which we find astounding–and we imagine that he liked what he saw. I think of the difficulty of asking a boy to choose between his mother and opportunity. He walks us to his house, past three-wheeled motos, lazy dogs with hungry eyes, and people who look at us not with the resentment that I had expected, but with friendliness and curiosity. Still, I’m uncomfortable with my own presence: my clothes, my sneakers, my bottle of clean drinking water, and scrub away any hint of judgment because there’s nothing to judge. Families here are doing the best they can in an economically fragile country where there are few decent jobs and not enough money for every child to go to school. Juan Carlos’ aunt tells us his mother sells candy at night because that’s when business is best, even though it’s more dangerous for her to be out at night.
I’m hesitant to enter the house, feeling like we are so boldly invading their privacy. Yet, Juan Carlos, his grandfather, his aunt, his sister–everyone–invites us in. There are two spare rooms on the first floor, but one is for the turkeys who gobble away, content in this dark room, unaware that they will be sold or eaten for Christmas. The second floor is an open-air roof, with a small kitchen covered with cardboard and a bunkbed for two of the several children who live here and another room or two tucked away, one locked. The fact that it rarely rains here is good for the families because their houses are vulnerable to the elements.
I chat with Juan Carlos’s sister in Spanish about her animals–two turkeys, two dogs, a cat with kittens. “What’s the kitten’s name?” I ask of the scrawny white one. She smiles. “Gringo,” she says. “Como yo (Like me),” I say. She laughs. The animals are thin and I wonder how they feed them and themselves.
El comedor, a kind of mother’s club/soup kitchen, provides lunches for the kids in the neighborhood, rice, wheat, chicken and pudding today, for 50 cents each. The women cook lunch in large, steaming pots with food purchased with money from the government. Some days there is no money, but the women say they manage.
We tour the kindergarten school, an oasis behind a locked gate, of four tiny classrooms, swept neat and colorfully painted. The teacher points out the science area (an empty aquarium) and the reading area with several books. She tells us the director wants to build the wall around the school higher to block out the cemetery. We bring a bag of school supplies, but when we hear that there are 85 kids, a few crayons, coloring books, and paper suddenly feels inadequate.
We take the bus back, sleepy and sober from what we’ve seen.
