And So It Begins

Barefooted children stomped in the street’s deep mud as our taxi crept by in the town of Oropesa. The tallest of the bunch, gangly and wearing a dirty Yankees cap, carried a mischievous grin, like at any moment he might splatter us with a glob of the red mud. Not as an act of aggression, but of child’s play, a joke on my wife and I who dared traverse their small town in a taxi. We were thirty miles south of Cusco, Peru, headed for Tipon, one of the must-see Inca ruins not named Machu Picchu. And like most travel around Cusco, we took a taxi, a “Tico” taxi. Think golf cart but with doors and through its flimsiness I could feel the pebbled mud scraping against the tiny car’s undercarriage.

It was mid-January and the start of peak rainy season. The skies opened up daily, usually in the afternoon, just when the heat and humidity met at a perfect, sweaty apex. I could only assume mud up to your ankles was as common as the daily rains.

Peru was my first trip outside the United States. The trip to Tipon through Oropesa, my first outside Lima and Cusco, and Oropesa’s poverty staggered me- the mud covered streets, the hollowed out, dark storefront windows, and the occasional sharp-boned cow, somber and unflinching as it stood in the street. The only energy emanated from the dozen or so children escorting us, laughing and cupping their hands to their mouths, whispering, plotting. And it was from this exuberance that a question dawned on me. Could they be the orphans? Could they be Los Ninos?

Back in Cusco we had stayed at Los Ninos Hotel, a quintessential Cusco hotel centered on a flowery inner courtyard. The owner, Jolanda van den Berg, had become locally famous for taking care of hundreds of neglected Peruvian children, photos of these children hanging throughout the hotel and in our room. It was from van den Berg’s Los Ninos Hacienda, located at the end of this road, at the end of Oropesa, that we planned to ride horseback into the distant hills and up to Tipon.

I pointed to the boys and whispered to my wife, Los Ninos, but she shook her head. These were not the same children in the pictures, she said. But still I wondered, could they become those children? I turned in my seat and watched them still dancing and sloshing about. Perhaps they were only the children of a poor town now rich in red mud. Or perhaps, and it was my newfound wish, their innocence and sweet curiosity signaled hope. Hope that they too would find their way into those photos.