T'astayoc

This town is full of incredible contradictions, but perhaps that’s just the way I felt when I was there.   Snow fell brown and white like the innocent painting I had in my room growing up of horses hidden in a snowy pasture.  Abra Malaga mountain intimidatingly rose up, up, up, above the surprisingly paved road. Around each curve it’s terrifying glacial peak juts out further and further into the sky, making me feel like it would topple over onto me, Leticia, and Isabel, the community health worker we had recently appointed in this town.  Tiny, one-room stone houses lay at its feet, the subject of our visit.  We were there to survey every inhabitant of T’astayoc, to get to know who lived there, how old they were, how many children they had, who they lived with, what they ate, used for birth control, what they harvested, what their monthly income was, where their water came from.  The town stretched above and below, separated by this odd and awkward paved road that mountain bikers use, that the townspeople only use when the bus slows down enough for them to get on. 

T’astayoc took us a half hour in a car to go from the top to the bottom.  At the top– a blurry, blizzardy one room home housed seven children and their parents who slept on the wet dirt floor and fed drivers passing through to the mountain.   By the time we reached the bottom house I couldn’t get out of the car I was so upset by what I had seen, so at a loss for what I could do, so unbelieving that this town was only an hour away from my town.  This house at the bottom was sunny, a bright contradiction to the top; they had a store, a motorcycle, and a person whose education reached past…going to school.  Leticia, Isabel and I took the top portion of the community, while the male promotor, an intern, and the driver took the bottom half.  Leticia, Isabel and I traversed through the snow to reach these houses. We were invited in with open arms, given coffee and potatoes, invited in to chat with people who had no idea why we were there.

The women we conversed with sat by their tiny fires in their otherwise heatless, windowless, and damp homes, with guinea pigs running underfoot and told us the story of their lives through census information.  They told us that they had on average between seven to nine children.  One woman had her first child when she was nine years old.  Nine tiny years old, and then she had six more children.  One woman had her first child at 12, another at 13.  Another had her first round of children with a man about 20 years her senior, then when he passed away she remarried a man three years older than her firstborn.  She was 13 when she had her first child – her husband in his early 30s.  I don’t even know how to complete my trains of thought after writing this, except to accept that they end in train wreck.  I have never in my years of working with sorrow, of feeling my body and soul ripped apart by the stories of others, I have never felt this feeling of stumbling upon the tip of an iceberg, asking questions these women had never been asked before, because if they had been asked, then what had happened afterward?  Why hadn’t the asker then gone and done something about it?  These women told me, told me in these tiny charcoal smudged rooms that they wanted to learn about reproductive health, about health in general, about vaginal infections, about how to prevent urinary tract infections, about how to take care of themselves.  In a space where there is only one other NGO who has put in solar panels (they put in one for a house that had no access to potable water, which makes me concerned for their priorities), they wanted so much more.  These women, pregnant at 9, 10, 11, and 12 had lived their lives in a parallel, no not even, the exact same world that I lived mine, where people happily go home to warm homes for holidays, where they live care-free charmed lives and worry, as I have been, about how to create their families to have a proper upbringing in safe neighborhoods where families play together, where families have happy memories together where families have positive associations with the ease and smiles that surrounded their home towns. 

These families that we saw – the lives they described to me were hard, always always hard. The women had animal fat and parts drying next to the fire, they made 200 soles per year (about 60 dollars) if they were able to sell potatoes.  They only grew potatoes, they only ate potatoes, if they had extra money they bought rice and pasta, never vegetables.  They walk about a half hour down the snowy hill, in their open-toed shoes made of old car tires, with a bucket to get water from a spring, bring it back up, and sometimes don’t boil it before drinking it.  Not one house in the entire community has a bathroom or a chimney.   They are merely surviving all the time.  Whereas on the contrary I have been living in surplus, in excess, in all the hype and privilege that is this developed world existence, they have been surviving.  This is so different than the poverty I have seen before because I am intimately aware and acutely attached to it.  We, this organization I manage, has two community health workers here who are able to create an unbelievable change.  We can put water filters in people’s homes, teach them about crop diversification, give them access to birth control and sex education, build green houses for them, give them something that has not been given before.  Until then, though, their reality remains, the faces of those women remain in my memory, marked as something I thought never could possibly exist.