The Road to Chaclacayo

We can sometimes go for several days during which we forget that we are living in Peru. That's partly due to the fact that family routine is family routine no matter where you go, but it's also partly because we have been in our little privileged Lima environment long enough for days to go by unremarked. But then we drive out to Chaclacayo to visit the kids at the Hogar, cutting a cross-section through the outskirts of Lima. I feel like recording what the drive is like, to take a mental snapshot of the little details along the way. As I've mentioned before, this post probably means more to me as a diary and is a little long for anyone else.

(these 2 photos from Google, on the road to Chaclacayo)

This section of Peru's desert coast is made of dusty foothills that quickly rise eastwards to become the Andes. So Lima's terrain is defined by rivers that cut down to the ocean. Our route to Chaclacayo goes up the valley of the river Rimac, close to an hour of driving through the clang and clamor of the city's edges. From our well-to-do area of La Molina, we take a shortcut along a backroad that skirts the Estadio Monumental, a secondary soccer stadium that looks to be sagging in a few places but probably serves the very popular "U" team just fine. As we passed the stadium last weekend, crossing a rough stretch of road, a crusty self-starter was out there with a shovel filling in potholes and taking donations from cars passing by. This part of the road seems almost forgotten, but then just past one of the city's many under-explored archeological ruins, the road swings around and meets up with a main artery, the Carretera Central where we merge with the trucks and taxi-vans called combis. 

This road is pressed on both sides by crowded neighborhoods and small businesses. There is a haze that makes everything appear monochrome; we wonder if it is fog or smog or dust. The road bottle-necks and brings the slums climbing the steep hills into better view. Half-finished houses tilt over each other, apparently held together by nothing more than grime and clotheslines. For me, there is not a lot of time for rubber-necking because the trucks and buses and combis are squeezing through the narrowed lanes. Stop-and-go traffic in Lima is a game of inches and yesterday my side mirror was scraped for the umpteenth time. Jennifer and I joked that side mirrors are more like traffic feelers and work kind of like cat whiskers. Once through this area, we start to see more moto-conchos, the economical 3-wheeled motorcycle taxis that ferry people from the main thoroughfare up to the barrios on the hillsides. Intersections now begin to be served by vendors of plantain chips, dubious looking sodas, cel phone cases and snacks that are a still mystery to me. Unasked, a boy of Carter's age does a phenomenally bad job of wiping our windshield...but we give him a sol (40 cents) and a little fast-food giveaway toy. This is enough to draw an older boy over, looking for similar largesse, and then the two huddle together to inspect the toy.

At one point, we pass a large derelict (or never finished?) industrial building of which the first two floors are occupied by squatters: front walls tacked together out of random materials, laundry strung between columns, even a couple spots where someone has set up shop. The road loosens up, gets dustier and rangy dogs skitter around the fringes. A couple of 1-room homes have a large bull made out of paper and sticks...Mariza tells me they are toros mechón (bull with curly locks) but she doesn't know what they are for. *   Factory entrances look like prison gates, while a local brake mechanic has welded a giant robot by his garage, a man with a pressure-washer cleans filthy trucks, and suddenly a cadre of security force trainees run by on a training run. On our left lie train tracks that eventually become one of the highest rail lines in the world, but here the rails delineate a corridor of rubble and shacks. Eventually, as the valley narrows, things get a little nicer...not pastoral, but now some gates hide little vacation compounds for weekenders and the neighborhoods are less oppressively compressed. Chaclacayo is a little mini getaway for some Limeños, with slightly sunnier weather and quiet back streets. Just beyond the tidy little central square, we arrive at the Hogar.

This visit is unusual in that we join the doctor who runs the Hogar at his weekly Saturday coffee at a local bakery. He has been in Florida for his semi-annual trip home for a month, but on these trips he also takes tri-peligic Viktor for prosthesis adjustments at Shriners Hospital. In Florida, Viktor stays with wealthy host families, with a private room and sometimes his own TV...once, during the return flight, Viktor started to scream because he didn't want to go back to Peru. It is nice to see a calm, undistracted side to the doctor because in the Hogar he is sour and stern. He and a couple of other volunteers like to bring along 2yr-old Percy to the bakery. Percy has an interrupted esophagus and gets his nourishment through a tube. But that doesn't mean that Percy can't enjoy a nice dessert. So there Percy sat, happily eating crema volteada (flan), while anything he swallowed exited out the surgically-installed hole in his neck, oozing out and over his neck diaper and down onto his chest. This was somehow endearing, disgusting and hilarious all at once. In the next couple months, Percy will receive the $10,000 operation to correct his esophagus.

*  [edit: Jen finally discovered that the bulls are laced with fireworks and are used at celebrations. The bulls also advertise the sale of technically illegal fireworks. Over the last decades, the tidal wave of migration to Lima from the Andes is marked by the fact that villages often moved to the same slum and stick together. We hear that almost every weekend there is a different celebration for a different village's patron idol, so fireworks are in high demand. Taxis and combis are another sign of this migratory clumping...many have decals proclaiming their village allegiance "El Señor de Magimachi", or some such, in drippy letters.]