Close up: Life in the Moche Valley
A peek into a day of health assessments in the Moche Valley.
Dusty air. The kind that settles in your lungs and under your fingernails.
The caw of a rooster, loud and hungry. KIKIRIKI it screams, over and over.
A litter strewn street, where a combi rumbles by, kicking up dust from the unpaved road.
A door made of tin roofing, latched to its ‘hinges’ with twine. It bangs back and forth with the morning wind.
Past the door lies the yard, though lacking that lush shade of green we know so well. In its place is a struggling garden of maize and other plants, sprouting defiantly out of the brown earth.
A clothing line, mended with various strings, droops with the weight of faded, worn items, drying in the spotty sun.
Swat the flies away as you step inside. The uneven dirt floor of the house is worn down with repeated shuffles of dirty flip flops to and fro.
The meagerly decorated adobe walls glow as the lone light bulb sways from its perch near the tarp that serves as a ceiling.
A kindly woman offers you her own seat, a sullied lawn chair—the best seat in the house. As you sit down, the crouched morsel of a woman hands you a cup of jugo, complete with blessings and welcomes to her humble dwelling.
Settling in for the hour-long ‘encuesta de salud’, you take mental notes of all you just experienced and prepare to travel through the jumbled and often sad history of this woman’s life.
Such is the day we’ve come to expect each morning as we set out to implement health assessments for all the communities of the Moche Valley.
The disparity between ourselves and the people we’ve come to help hangs in the air, along with the common ‘gringos’ slang used to describe us. Each day I meet someone new, my eyes open a bit wider to the situation these people live in and how better we can serve them. Although living in substandard housing with no bathrooms, scraping to feed their families, the kindness and openness these individuals have shown our organization is overwhelming. The women invite us into their homes; the men greet us as we pass them on our search; and the children are endless sources of energy and questions.
Today we completed our field work for the health assessments, and while we are glad to have reached our goal, the process itself has been very rewarding. To be welcomed so intimately into a community and treated with the utmost hospitality, while we ask our hosts to divulge their most personal information has made an enormous impression on all of us.
