Life in outer Cusco

Picture in your mind the home in which you live. See each room with your belongings. Know that at any moment you can go to the kitchen and eat, or head to the bathroom for a hot shower.

Now forget plaster and painted walls, forget carpet or timber floors. Forget ceilings and insulation, lights and electricity. Forget plumbing. Forget individual rooms: lounge, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. Those are luxuries here, not necessities.

In this small town outside of Cusco, on a busy main road to the famous Pisac Markets, brown shelters dot the landscape. These haphazard structures are the homes of the local farmers, made of mud bricks which morph and crumble from too much moisture. The carpet is made of dirt, flattened smooth from footsteps. The roofing is mere sheets of plastic, little guard against the ever present rain. Being close to nature is an understatement; in this home you live and breath the earth, the dirt becomes a second skin.

This home, made of a single room for eating, sleeping and cooking, houses 3 people: a mother, sans husband, and her daughter aged 6 and son aged 9. In the corner of the home is a pen filled with guinea pigs. While the daughter plays with them as pets, they are also a source of income for the family; guinea pig is a specialty food dish in Peru.

To feed her children, this mother works at neighbouring farms, or goes to the city to sell food and drink to the tourist crowds passing by. She is just one of many women, constantly ignored on the street corner, standing silently and unable to understand the strange tongues of the multitude of travellers.

Here we stood, foreigners in a foreign home, an invasion of intimacy in the name of charity, looking at the mother and her children. We were invited to ask questions. But for many of our questions, the answers were all too clear. Life here is hard and unforgiving. In the night the home is freezing, and the rain leaks through the flimsy roof. Yet the children smile and laugh, jumping across the bed, feet bare and deeply cracked.

We will return next week with items that she asked us for, things she alone cannot provide her children: clothes, shoes, school supplies and seeds to grow their food. As we leave the home, all we can do is ruminate on how our place of birth dictates our fate, but is the one thing over which we have absolutely no control. Their home could easily have been ours.