Poverty in Chincha
Mariana Gledhill from Wellington, N.Z is currently spending 7 months in Peru doing voluntary work. She shares her experiences.
Hello Everyone
Sorry I have not mailed in a while. I have just been really busy being sick(again), eating far too much, travelling and hanging out with the new friends that I have made around here.
How am I going? Well, great. I feel lucky, more lucky than I have ever felt in my life. I wake up each morning and have bread with whatever my family has on the table, avocado, fried cheese (yep, you read that right), butter or chicken, (fried of course). And as I walk to work, I see others struggling to get their breakfasts by going through garbage on the roadside, eating banana skins, or desperately trying to sell their wares in a market that is bursting at the seams.
The bus to work goes through the poorest area in Chincha, where there is no water and, at times, electricity. I see people getting water out of channels that run along the roadside. Those same channels are ones that I cannot bear the smell of, because people throw their rubbish and household waste in them. Sometimes they dry up. That must be even worse for these people.
At work, I help kids with basic literacy or numeracy. I comfort kids who cry for their parents and child prostitutes that have emotional scars that will probably never heal. I look at the kids and wish for them to have happy lives but I know that it is not easily possible. When a kid cries about not seeing her parents and the state of the world, I picture what my father said when I cried about my cloistered and rather rich world. He said life´s not fair, kid. But I cannot say it to these kids because I do not have the heart to. It is stating the obvious because it stares them in the face every day.
There is poverty in New Zealand, yes, but it is hidden and a lot of people fool themselves that it does not exist. Here, if you do not know that, you are blind, deaf and in a vegetable like state. I don´t think that the middle class in New Zealand has problems. Sorry, I know that some of you do, but I do not because after seeing the face of a parent who has to live apart from their child because of the fact that they earn no money, after seeing people eating avocado skins and munching on plastic, and after seeing children with raw wounds on their knees with the parents having no means of covering them up, one cannot say that the middle class of New Zealand is struggling.
I guess this mail sounds depressed, but I am not. I am going well because I feel lucky. I just want to learn more Spanish now so I can help more. I feel lucky being able to do this.
Chau chicos
Love Mariana
