Nourish and the Health and Sanitation Campaign

Living with the dead is a strange idea.

But while this concept might be foreign to us, the people who occupied the Moche Valley from 100-800 A.D. gave dead ancestors their own rooms in the houses. They believed the spirits of those dead still lived with them, while their physical bodies slept in the back rooms. These dead bodies might have even been given new life during rituals and brought out of their tombs.

These stories were told to our group on Saturday when we visited the Moche Valley archeological site. The work that we will soon be doing with the small communities now occupying the valley helps protect this and other archeological sites. UNC professor of archeology and co-founder of Moche Inc., Brian Billman, set up this exchange with the local Peruvians. As Moche Inc. helps to develop the surroundings, the locals hire people to protect the sites from potential looters and squatters who can damage the area and permanently erase the surviving history.

The atmosphere of the valley, dry and desert like, has not affected most of Moche’s historical presence. Walking from the bottom of the valley up one mountain, we all saw numerous fragments of clay pots, some still with distinct paint on them, bones, and large rocks with extremely smooth tops that had been used as grinding stones.

During the period of the Moche civilization, women would have gathered around this stone, using its surface to grind their food.

After leaving the site, we visited Ciudad de Dios, the village where the previous Nourish International group developed a clean water system. The children and women all knew Juliana, an archeology graduate student who has previously worked with the village, and would shout her name and embrace her as we walked around. The village has a small central plaza of irrigated concrete squares, designed to someday be gardens, a four room school, one small village bathroom, and a soccer court also made of concrete. Due to my lack of fluency in Spanish, I communicated best with the children under age 5, playing with them in the sand and climbing on the soccer goal.

Vera and Rosa hang around the soccer goal at Ciudad de Dios.

Returning to the beautiful beach town of Huanchaco, where our hostal is located, adds a thought provoking contrast to the lives of the villagers with whom we had been playing and conversing. Although, I know we will all appreciate the comfort of our hostal’s luxuries, heated running water, mattresses, nutritious food, much more once our work starts.

With the villages and area now visualized, our project meetings have taken on a new strength of ideas as the benefits of our projects now have a face.