Paradise Plagiarism

This is copied (with permission) from someone very dear to me. Her description makes my eyes well up with emotion and then smile at the next paragraph. It is both beautiful and tragic, reminding me of the world outside my everyday bubble. Heartbreaking, frustrating, and hopeful all at once. She has a gift, both in how she shares this story, and in the work that she does so passionately.

FRIDAY

You work with it most days. You’re trained to not let it affect your innards. You see it all the time all around you, but some days it just kicks you in the gut. You can feel it in your stomach and the discomfort is intense and doesn’t go away.

It was a Friday. You know, the usual, choose which house in the slum is the poorest to improve to create a better quality of life for a family this means going around to visit the “poor” families to see who has the greatest need, determine what is greatest need and who seriously contemplate who it was that decided that you had the capabilities to make that determination.

This is the part that kicked me in the gut. We visited three houses. All members of the Centro Mujer, women and their families. All living in deplorable conditions, a true violation of human rights. Accompanied by a 50 year old worker at the centre, who is known for her strong opinions and harsh words, we walk a few blocks up, through the now closed market with all the smells of the afternoon after a market. We come to the house of a grandmother who takes care of her three grandchildren, her whole extended family live in this house. It has brick walls on two sides, the front is of plywood. Outside it has a tree planted by a previous group of gringos, the tree is called Angel Guardian. The front room has a tin roof, we go back to see the bedroom, straw matting and a tarp for a roof, we peer into the room, trying to focus in the dimness even though it is mid day, we see the drizzle accumulating in puddles on the tarp and the drips slowly making their way to the bed and all the possessions below. We say we are just visiting to invite her to help with the event tomorrow, she says she will come and she will make some nice hot ponche for the tourists, so they don’t get too cold. She’s always very hospitable, she apologizes that she has nothing to feed us, as she didn’t know we were coming. She apologizes for the state of poverty she lives in.

We walk a few more blocks down some muddy alleys past an old rusted out car. There is a piece of plywood blocking the distance between the old car and a big rock, must be the door. We knock, a girl answers, she must be about 8, she is looking after her cousins and her mother isn’t home, we look past her to see another rusted out car and two little girls, the oldest no more than two years old, sticking their heads out of the windowless windows of the car, where they had just woke from their naps. Yes they were all sleeping in the old cars, she says, because that’s the only place the rain doesn’t come in at night, well except through the windows, but the roof keeps them a bit dry she says. This is how they live. The faces of those two little beautiful creations in that car will always be burned in my memory. The inequality and injustice of great poverty hit me so strongly in that moment that I truly felt winded and on the verge of tears and had to turn around and walk away. I am supposed to be a professional, I have seen great poverty all over the world, but sometimes, for some inexplicable reason it hits you with enough strength to knock you out. It gives you great pain, but it also reminds you why you do what you do. Because it is a failure of humanity, our personal failure, that those beautiful children have to grow up in extreme poverty with no option for escape, so few opportunities available to them. It is a travesty that we are all responsible to make right. That is why I do what I do, and every once in while, you just need a kick in the gut.

The third house still awaited us, but I had already made up my mind which family we would be building a house for tomorrow. That is, until I reached the third house. We walked up to the cemetery, we wanted to take a moto taxi but none of them go that far, they don’t like to go through the cemetery. So we walk through the cemetery, getting decidedly soggy and the bottoms of my pants and shoes covered in mud and goodness knows what else from the continuous foggy, dreary, drizzle that is Lima in winter. We arrive at Paraiso, or Paradise, on the other side of the cemetery, I have visited it many times and it always gives me a different concept of my definition of paradise. It is one of the poorer areas of the slum, an invasion, a squatter settlement, meaning the families that live here could be kicked off their land at any time. No running water or sewer, minimal electricity, most people here cook with kerosene as opposed to propane that is more economical but needs to be bought by the tank which requires more money at one time than most people living here in paradise can afford. We start climbing the cerros, and the mud squelches under my shoes, I slip and slide in some small river of unknown liquid that is trickling down the hill, almost wipe out but I cling to a rock jutting out of the side of the hill. We reach the house, a woman I have known for two years, her 8 year old daughter comes to greet me, the friendliest kid I know, always wanting a hug and wondering how I am. She often accompanies me on home visits that I do in this neighbourhood. I go into their house; its walls are built of straw matting and the roof as well. The three little pigs wouldn’t stand a chance in here. Normally if you have straw matting on your roof, because it is the cheapest construction material, you would also have some sort of plastic or tarp to keep the rain out. This family doesn’t, she tells me her three small children are always sick with respiratory problems from the constant damp and dust. They have all been in and out of hospital since they were born. We chat for a while; she works sewing beads onto t-shirts- you know like the ones you buy at Old Navy or the Gap? She gets paid 20 cents a shirt and each shirt takes her about 2 hours, it is painstaking work, tiny beads in exact formation, you often get discounted, she says she hasn’t been paid for her work for the last month and a half. I leave her to her work and discuss the three houses with my colleague. We decide on the last house we saw. I go back to the house and tell this woman that tomorrow we will build walls and a roof for her house, so that her children don’t have to be sick all the time. The look in her eyes I will never forget, she had no words to say to me but the tears started to fall down her face, I have never felt so blessed to be able to accompany her in that moment.

So continuing on with the Friday night, after determining who is the poorest of the poor your job is to: get building supplies, find someone to build it - that is, find someone who knows something about construction who wants to work with a few hours notice on the biggest holiday in Peru, 28 de Julio, Independence Day, an impossible task- tell the family to clear their stuff out, get building supplies through the cemetery and up the hill to the straw matting that was the existing house, figure out how to get four pre-used pre-built plywood walls off of the third floor of the Centro Mujer, which is currently undergoing construction so the brick walls are still wet with mortar- try not to knock them down—get these plywood walls down to the street, through the cemetery and up the hill- with only the help of five older women who aren’t really the wall moving types. All because a group of gringos is coming, with about half a day notice and want to build a house. While you are doing all of the above, also, teach one of the final sessions, on how to be a leader in the community to stop the endemic violence, to a group of volunteer domestic violence counselors, as there is no access to sufficient professional services in the slum that I call home, San Juan de Lurigancho.

BUT, that’s not all, one of the women who you are training has a epileptic seizure in the middle of the workshop, this then precipitates hysterical crying from one of the other women whose mother is dying in hospital and her husband has just left her and her two children after beating her so badly she was unconscious and is therefore triggered because of being seriously traumatized and under a lot of stress.

AND, or perhaps because of, all the excitement, you start to see stars, which might be exciting if you had just imbibed some sort of hallucinogenic plant found only in the deepest, darkest Peruvian Amazon jungle, however, having experienced this before, you know that you have not had access to such a plant and therefore it is in fact the beginning of a migraine…. soon the vomiting and possibly suicide inducing headache will begin…. but for now, you can’t see. As you are the only one in the centre and the group came all this way on the cold, drizzly day you must finish the session. So you give them a group activity to do while you slip away for a minute to run down the block to your house and pop some gravol and pain pills so at least you won’t vomit on the fabulous women while you finish the session, hoping that you remember the just of what you were planning on saying as you can’t read any of your notes, due to the flashing lights in your eyes.

So while you are feeling around your room to find your drugs, you hear what sounds distinctly like gunshots….but being in a poor slum, you once again thank God that the many gangs in the neighborhood can’t afford guns and usually just throw rocks and beat rival gangs with sticks. However, on your return to the Centro Mujer, you notice everyone picking themselves up off the floor and brushing themselves off. You ask, what’s going on, thinking perhaps it was some sort of icebreaker or other fun activity that they decided to try since you were not there temporarily to lead the group. ---Turns out that it was in fact gun shots that you heard and somehow one of the gangs was shooting at a rival gang member, right outside the centre, on the street corner you just walk past, where the women were helping to lower plywood walls moments earlier. Hmm, makes you think, this getting rid of the violence thing is tricky, these motivated women you’re training don’t really know what they signed themselves up for. Creating change in a community that has deeply ingrained inequality, poverty and violence, the possibilities are endless.

Just your run of the mill, average, boring Friday.