Teacher on Two Wheels

Above: This picture has almost nothing to do with this post. It was taken in Nasca’s museum, and lots of the driving conversation recounted here took place near Nasca. So it kinda is related to the post. Kinda. Truth is, I forgot to take pictures of the taxi drivers mentioned below. So, because I really like mummies, a picture of elongated mummy skulls will have to suffice. Oh yeah, the ancient Nasca tribes that created this skull art did so by wrapping a tight band around a person’s head for years while she/he was still alive.

Friday 9/5/08 Ayacucho, Peru

The sands of the Nasca desert lightened as the sun rose, shedding their nighttime browns for warmer tans and yellows. A thin haze hovered above the base of the arid mountains to our right and waited for the warmth of the sun to signal the start of its dissipation. The only noise shredding the desert’s silence was the high whine of our small taxi’s engine. With no other cars in sight, we raced down a straight, black string of desert asphalt at dizzying speeds.

“Hey, what’s the speed limit here?” I asked the cab driver in Spanish, half hoping to make conversation, half hoping to get him to slow down a bit.

“Hahaha! Here? Well that depends on your car, really. If you have a fast car, you can go fast. If you have a slow one, your ‘speed limit’ is lower!” He laughed a deep, coffee-fueled morning laugh. “This car has a small engine. My other taxi, the one I had before this one, was much faster.”

*****

At one point in the ride, after I explained why my parents only had two children and not 12 or so, like the taxi driver’s parents, we passed a small one room bamboo shack by the roadside. It had no windows and was adorned with only a small Peruvian flag. For dozens of miles in all directions, the shack was surrounded by vast expanses of desert. The nearest neighbor was not near enough to see, hear, or visit easily by car.

“I have a question for you. We’ve passed a few of these types of houses on our trip so far. Do you know why these people choose to live out here, with no one else around?” I asked.

“Gas,” the cab driver said. “They sell gas to passing cars. They try to find the place that is furthest away from other gas stations, other people, and they build a small house like that.”

“And do you know why they have a Peruvian flag on their roof? Are they just really patriotic?” I asked, fumbling up the Spanish a bit. I doubted the residents were flying a Peruvian flag because they were patriotic. Patriotism is often linked to how well one feels his/her government succeeds at taking care of its populace, at providing a good place to live. I assumed that the people choking with poverty, the people living in one room shacks in the middle of the desert, didn’t feel as though their government was doing a sufficient job of taking care of their best interests.

“Oh, that? No, no not patriotism,” the cab driver said, laughing. “No, they do that because they are smart. See, they are living illegally out here. They don’t own this land. No one does, actually. Not the government, not anyone. But still, they aren’t allowed to be here. So, they fly the flag on their house to protect it. If the police come with a bulldozer to knock the house down, they won’t be able to. We have a law here that says you can’t dirty the national flag. If the bulldozer knocks the house down, the flag will get dirty. Smart, huh?”

Above: A cluster of shacks in the desert. Only one or two flags are visible in this picture

*****

Alonso had a boyish face with a smile that seemed to come out of nowhere. One second his countenance was relaxed and focused looking; the next it was ablaze with laughter and giggle. He was a volunteer firefighter. “Mostly car accidents around here. Not many real fires,” he said. At 25, he was young enough to still have a bit of mystery in his life, uncertainty in his future.

“Oh, see this town here,” he said, pointing to the outskirts of what turned out to be a small city. “My girlfriend will start teaching here at the beginning of the school year.”

“Here? It’s so far away from where you guys live,” I said, remembering that Alonso picked us up in his hometown almost an hour and a half away. “Didn’t you say you guys live together back in Ica?” I asked.

“Yeah, we do. This is the closest English teaching job she could find. It’s far, but she has to take what she can get,” he said. “She’s only going to work here for a few years until we can get to Spain. Once she can teach English in Spain, we’ll be OK. Lots of money in Spain, right?” he said, turning to me, smiling, hopeful. He wanted me to confirm this somehow, to tell him I knew for sure that there was lots of money there just waiting to be earned by eager teachers. I hoped, for his sake, that there was.

*****

As we neared Lima, more and more of the types of shacks we saw selling gas in the desert began popping up on the treeless sand dunes that line Peru’s section of the Pan-American Highway. At first we’d spot two or three up on a ridge, huddled together like scared puppies. Then we started seeing small pueblos with 10 or 15 shacks clustered together. Finally, when we were within 20 miles of Lima, sprawling shantytowns appeared, complete with government-installed street lights and wide dirt streets.

The atmosphere of the shantytowns was made worse by the complete lack of vegetation in their surrounding environment. All shacks were situated on water-less, plant-less, brown sand. Most had no windows and were constructed of thin reed mats or bamboo. Most were comprised of a single room. Almost every single shack was topped with a bright red and white Peruvian flag.

What is the yarn that holds lives together out here, I wondered. Could love of family or religion be enough to preserve one’s sanity and sense of life purpose here? How do you light a life, inspire a life, that is spent in a single room in a reed shack? Do the children here have the same capacity to hope that other children have?

Never before, not in other impoverished places I’ve visited, have I seen so many people living under such crippling poverty. That wealthy Peruvians living in Lima have the audacity to buy Porsche SUVs and drive them down the Pan-American, past the shantytowns, is baffling. I doubt a greater wealth gap exists (or could exist) in any other country in the world.