Faces from Puentes de Vida

PERU Focus

Many of the families in Collique have lived in this makeshift settlement for as long as 10 years. Some came here from the mountains in Peru’s interior, refugees from the war between the Communist guerrillas of the Shining Path movement and the army.

This is what happened to Dina Obregon Palomina. Aged 41 and the mother of eight children, she is one of the women who help to cook the food in the Pan de Vida project Puentes de Vida (‘Bridges of Life’). Helping at the project is her only work.

Before she came there, she lived in the Ayacucho region, in South Central Peru, which, in the 1980s and early 1990s, was the centre of activities of the Shining Path. At one time, anyone believed to be supporting a particular side could be (unceremoniously) executed by the other and when three members of her family were executed, she and the rest of her relatives felt they had no choice but to leave.

Abandoning their possessions, they fled to the comparative safety of Lima and here, staking their claim on an empty plot of land, they built a shack of planks, sheet metal and blankets retrieved from a collection of garbage. At first, naturally, the place had no water and no electricity but now it boasts brick walls and two rooms – luxury compared with other houses in which as many as eight people share one bed in a single room.

Jonathan Balberde’s home is similar. Jonathan, aged nine, has tuberculosis. Today is one of his bad days so he has not been to the Pan de Vida Centre. His parents do not seem to be around today but he and his brother Victor, 13, are outside playing with a litter of six puppies. Slum communities, if anything, have even more dogs than children.

Different world

Inside the house, a small gas cooker – all the family has by way of a kitchen – stands in one corner, their wardrobe a rope slung along under the roof. On one wall, a black and white television displays a stream of images of a quite different world somewhere else. Their lavatory is a hole in the ground, the shower a hosepipe hanging up behind a blanket.

But in spite of the acute poverty, there are many positive signs: some houses have cheery-faced sunflowers growing outside, others have gardens where they grow vegetables. Many families make it their occupation to go picking over garbage heaps for paper, plastic and other commodities that they can sell for recycling.

A few have opened small shops where they sell fruit or other goods. One runs a shoe repairer’s. (Residents here repair, patch and mend things almost ad infinitum; nothing gets thrown away unless it is completely unusable.) Incredibly, in one home there is a petrol station, complete with a 1,200-litre tank and pump in the main room. The man who runs it decided that having it outside made it too vulnerable to theft.

Many homes are permanently under construction: as soon as there is any extra money, another room or floor is added, or a makeshift home is replaced with one made of real brick. So in the midst of this very real hardship creativity flourishes like flowers in the dirt, visible evidence that the slum-dwellers’ will to improve their lot and their living conditions is far from dead.  (WR 388/7 - 10/11.04)