25 March 2018
This week's journeys took us along the southern coast a few hours south from Lima. We traveled in order to interview wheelchair recipients from last year's delivery near Chincha and to attend a wheelchair delivery in Ica.
Into the Desert
The entire coast of Peru is one of the driest deserts in the world. Only occasional desert plants grow without irrigation. Lima is green only because of the irrigation, and there are some coastal areas where the few rivers coming out of the Andes Mountains allow agriculture. But beyond that, everything else is super dry.
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| Traveling along the coast south of Lima into one of the driest places on earth. Date palms and a few scrub plants are the only things growing in all the sand. |
Our journey took us to the cities of Ica and Chincha. Both places are too small to support commercial airline flights, so we went by bus.
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| Chincha and Ica in the coastal deserts south of Lima. |
We were fearful of taking long-distance buses in Peru, but the locals told us that there are several luxury bus lines that make the journeys pleasant. We booked with a bus line called "Cruz del Sur" (Southern Cross) and ended up with fully reclining seats on a double-decker bus, complete with 'flight' attendant and snacks. The 4-hour journey each way, although a little on the warm side, was actually comfortable. And the fares were cheap - $20 per ticket going down and $15 per ticket coming back.
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| Luxury double-decker buses helped make the journey less painful. |
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| Super nice, fully reclining seats made this bus feel more like being in first-class on a flight. |
The scenery was pretty sparse for most of the journey. Most places along the way looked like what you would expect to see in the Sahara or in Saudi Arabia. The only thing missing from the picture were the camels.
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| How can anything grow in all this sand? |
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| The more lush parts had date palms that someone had planted long ago. |
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| We passed a few plantations of date palms. These plants love the heat. The drier and hotter the temperature, the sweeter the fruit (according to the locals). |
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| Date palms throughout the region were loaded with the fruit they harvest when it is ripe. Locals told us they prefer to leave the fruit on the palm tree until it is dried (like a raisin) because it is sweeter than harvesting and drying on the ground. |
Several large pre-Inca temple pyramids dotted the desert landscape. These ruins have been around for up to 1,000 years, built by advanced cultures that ruled in Peru for millennia before the Inca empire. Because there are so many of these ruins all over Peru, only the most gigantic seem to get any attention.
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| Ruins of Huaca Centenila outside of Chincha. These massive ruins are found all over Peru, remnants of the many cultures that existed here long before the Incas. |
Wheelchair Interviews in Chincha
For our wheelchair donations (1,200 total here in Peru in the last year), we perform followup interviews on 5 percent of the recipients to ensure the donations were handled properly (meaning that the recipients did not get charged anything for their wheelchairs and that they did not turn around and sell the wheelchairs). For this year's donation, the total number of interviews will end up being about 60, and they are chosen at random around Peru (although we try to group the interviews into geographical areas to speed the process and reduce the cost).
We were asked this year by the Area Presidency to include young single adults in the interviews. So we made arrangements with the local church leaders in Chincha to have a few young single adults show up to help. We ended up with a group of four very capable volunteers (three of which were returned missionaries), along with a stake president (Manuel Contreras) who had driven us from Ica to Chincha.
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| Sandy and Marshall, along with the four single adults from Chincha, Stake President Manuel Contreras from Ica, and Elena Loyola from the village. |
We hoped to complete at least five interviews in the small village of Tambo de Mora. Elena Loyola, a small but compassionate woman from the village, previously worked with the disabled people in the village to get the wheelchair donation. She suffered from polio as a young woman and had difficulties walking, but she helped orchestrate all of the interviews and led us around the village to the homes of the disabled wheelchair recipients.
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| Walking the streets of Tambo de Mora from house to house to interview the disabled. The young single adults wore their "Mormon Helping Hands" vests to clearly identify this as an official activity. |
The interviews included four pages of questions to ensure the wheelchair delivery was handled properly and to make sure the chair still worked and was being maintained.
I did the first interview while the group observed, then we put the rest of the interviews into the hands of the young single adults and the stake president, and we accompanied them from home to home.
Because of our numbers, we split into two groups, and Elena helped direct each group as we traversed the village. While we had hoped to complete at least 5 interviews total, we were delighted at the end of the day when we had completed a total of 10.
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| Kiera and Bruno interviewed this man, a stoke victim with a paralyzed left side, in his home. Without this wheelchair, this man would be bedridden. |
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| Jessica and Paloma interviewed this woman who was confined to her donated wheelchair due to age-related disability. |
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| This 87-year-old woman needed her son to help her answer the questions because she was mostly deaf. |
The young adults who participated were affected by the whole process and came away with a much greater understanding of how this humanitarian work positively changes the lives of the poor who otherwise would remain bedridden or confined to their home.
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| We all joined together for this interview of a former fisherman who lost his leg and right eye in a fishing accident 33 years ago. |
These wheelchair donations are truly a blessing in the lives of the recipients - the chairs give them mobility and allow them to live with greater freedom and be less of a burden to their families, restoring dignity to their lives.
Our day of interviews was a complete success, and this experience, we are sure, will have a lasting effect on the young adults who helped.
Wheelchair Donation in Ica
The day after the interviews, we helped participate in the donation of 74 wheelchairs in Ica. Our partner, the National Rehabilitation Institute (INR) in Lima, had previously evaluated those that were to receive the chairs. They arrived a day early and assembled all the wheelchairs, with the help of their partner organization in Ica.
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| Wheelchairs assembled and lined up for the donation ceremony. They even put bows on the chairs as a nice touch for this gift. |
The actual donation had to wait until after the ceremony in the town hall. Everything went well, except they got a little mixed up on who was attending. They kept calling President Russell M. Nelson to come up to the podium. I had to explain to the master of ceremony that President Nelson was the worldwide church president living in the United States, but that the local stake church president, Manuel Contreras, was there at the ceremony representing him.
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| Donation ceremony in the elaborate Ica City Hall. The mayor of the city of Ica thanked the church for the donation to the disabled members of their city. |
After the ceremony, we all went outside where the recipients were waiting patiently on the street near the Plaza de Armas for the donation to begin.
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| The city shut down traffic and erected tents for those who were to receive their wheelchairs while waiting in the shade. |
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| The show got underway with a half dozen chairs passed out in a symbolic delivery. The press took photos, and the city officials got to be part of the show. Recipients were just pleased when the donation got underway. |
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| This grandmother was pleased that she can now carry her granddaughter around from the comfort of her wheelchair. |
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| After signing the paperwork, the recipient gets the new chair. In this case, they already had an old chair in need of repair, so they leave the old chair in exchange for the new one (at least that is the way it is supposed to work). |
Each chair is custom sized to the recipient, based on about 15 different models and sizes that we donate. If the chair is too big or too small, it can cause bio-mechanical problems for the user or cause bed sores.
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| The wife and daughter of this disabled man gratefully thanked us for the donation (including giving us both the customary kisses on the cheek). This man can now return to work with the mobility a wheelchair gives and the dignity it restores to his life. |
These wheelchair deliveries take place throughout the year. We can attend some of these deliveries if we happen to be in a part of the country where we also have other projects underway (such as the interviews we were doing in Chincha).
The next delivery is in two weeks out in the high-jungle city of Oxapampa. We have another project in that city, so it looks like we will attend that ceremony, also. (The only challenge is that is a 10-hour bus ride each way to get out there).
Strange Cuisine - Cat Dishes
Before our trip to Chincha, many people in the office teased us by saying we should order 'cat' in the restaurants. We thought they were joking until we asked the locals in Chincha, and they said that, indeed, Chincha has a reputation for serving up cat dishes.
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| Cat - the other white meat in some areas of Peru |
Apparently, several hundred years ago the AfroPeruvian settlers in this region were dying of starvation and were forced to eat their cats in order to survive. The tradition of eating cat continues to this day. Some restaurants discreetly serve cat on their menus to those who love the dish.
The government has been trying for years to shut down annual cat-eating celebrations that honor the earlier historic event, but traditions die hard and it is hard to shut down these celebrations. The "Gastronomic Festival of the Cat" is one of these events where the community gathers to dine on cat stew, cat burgers, and other spicy cat delicacies.
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| Peruvian news program about government efforts to shut down the "Fiesta de los Come Gato" (the annual cat-eating festival). |
We didn't see any cat on the menus in the restaurants where we ate, so we didn't get to eat any cat (at least that we were aware of)!
Oasis and Sand Dunes
All around Ica is nothing but hundreds of square miles of sand and sand dunes. We had a few hours free on Saturday before our bus ride back to Lima, so we took a taxi 3 miles out of town to a place called Huacachina, a small resort in an oasis in the middle of gigantic sand dunes.
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| Oasis lake at Huacachina in the middle of the dunes. |
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| It is hard to imagine how much sand surrounds the city of Ica. The oasis in Huacachina, just a few miles from Ica, is an incredible site to behold. |
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| In the distance, beyond the sand dunes, is the city of Ica. Behind where I took this photo was nothing but sand. We couldn't see the end of it. |
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| A second smaller oasis sits close to the first one. Note the dune buggy cruising nearby. |
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| In the limited time we had before our bus ride home, we decided to take a dune buggy tour - what an incredibly wild ride up and down through the tall mountains of sand. |
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| Our tour also included some dune surfing. You sit or lay on the boards and zip down the side of tall sand dunes. Coming back up was a challenge in sandals. We had to take off the sandals, but then the sand burned our feet. |
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| Farewell to Huacachina - such a green and beautiful oasis in such a stark desert of sand. |
In all, it was a good trip to Chincha and Ica, and our 4-hour bus ride back home gave us the chance to watch movies on our individual screens (just like the airlines). However, the shows were in Spanish (including Coco). Thank goodness we understand enough that it made sense.
And so we return to the office and try to get plenty of work done this week before our next journey out into the jungle for the next wheelchair delivery.
