Inca Empire - Cusco and Wheelchairs

9 April 2017

Our work this week took us to Cusco, the capital of the Inca Empire until the Spaniards arrived 500 years ago. Cusco sits high in the Andes at 12,000-feet elevation, and it is the gateway to Machu Picchu (one of the best-known sights in the world). But our journey here was not for sight-seeing. Rather, we came to participate in a wheelchair donation and evaluator-maintainer training.

Sitting high in the Andes Mountains in the south-central part of Peru, Cusco was the seat of power for the Incas, who ruled most of Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and beyond.

Around Cusco

We were happy to arrive in Cusco for this humanitarian event. Temperatures here in the mountains were cool to cold, a welcome relief from the heat of the jungle where we spent the previous week.

The Incas made Cusco their capital from which they ruled their vast empire. After the conquest, the Spanish tore down much of the Inca city and built their own churches on top of former Inca temples.

Surrounded by mountains, Cusco is both ancient and modern. The city is filled with buildings built by the Spaniards after the 1530s, many of which sit on top of Inca foundations. 

Traditional Spanish balconies and columns in the Plaza de Armas hark back to colonial days. Note that everyone wears jackets at this altitude, even though fall has just barely begun in the Southern Hemisphere.

Cusco's Plaza de Armas - Spanish influence high in the Andes.

All around the Plaza de Armas in Cusco feels like being in Spain, only at much higher altitude.

Descendants of the Inca

Where did the Incas go? They stayed in the Andes and maintained their language and much of their culture. Quechua (KAY-chwa) was the language for the Inca, and it was spoken throughout the Andes from Chile on the south to Ecuador on the north. The language lives on, and more than 4 million Peruvians (plus an additional 6 million in the other countries) still speak Quechua as their first language (although most are now equally bilingual in Spanish).

Here is a traditional Andean woman from near Cusco who spoke no Spanish, only Quechua.

Traditional Quechua-speaking woman.

With 90 percent of the population in Cusco being native Quechua speakers, it was no surprise that all the participants in our wheelchair evaluator and maintainer course spoke Quechua at home (although they were also fluent in Spanish). The two languages share nothing in common, and Quechua is vastly more difficult to master than Spanish.

During the wheelchair donation, we needed translation when dealing with this older group who could only speak their native Quechua.

Peruvians say that those who speak Quechua are true descendants of the Inca. Quechua is now taught in schools, but until very recently, Quechua was only learned at home from parents and grandparents.

Traditional Andean musicians perform in almost every restaurant in Cusco. This group was playing their traditional Kena (flute of the Inca), charango (small stringed instrument like a mandolin), and guitar.  While everyone in this group sang in Spanish, they were all native Quechua speakers.

Traditional Peruvian woman with her pet llama. I snapped this shot as we drove by. She charges tourists a few Peruvian Soles ($0.50 to $1.00) for a photo op with her cute little pet. (I think she hid the face from me as we drove by because we were not paying customers.)

While the Inca had no written language, they were a very advanced civilization that quickly crumbled under the guns and germs brought in from Europe. However, these people have assimilated into western culture while still maintaining their culture. Note the very modern equipment used by these descendants of the Inca in a regional bike race that was underway when we arrived in Cusco.

A bike race underway when we arrived - at 12,000-feet elevation on wet cobblestone streets. As one local told us - 'In Peru, anything is possible!'

Wheelchair Donation in the Andes

The main purpose of our trip was to assist our partner from Lima, the National Institute of Rehabilitation (Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitación - INR), with a donation of wheelchairs this week. The church and the INR have been working together for the past several years to enable our donations to reach further into the Peruvian countryside where there exists tremendous needs. Of the 1,100 wheelchairs donated by the church this year in Peru, 100 were earmarked for Cusco.

Part of our donation of 100 wheelchairs setup in the city coliseum for the public handover. 

Part of the masses of disabled people who showed up in the morning to pick their wheelchairs.

Crowds started arriving long before the handovery ceremony.

View from the stage in the coliseum with crowds of recipients starting to arrive. Wheelchairs were lined up in front.

The handover ceremony was a big deal, with local government and civic officials, two brass bands, banners, a radio announcer (also in a wheelchair), and news coverage from all the local TV and radio stations. I  got pulled (reluctantly) onto the stage and ended up addressing the crowd in Spanish. We also had a local church Stake President and High Councilor speak. When the exhausting 1-1/2 hour ceremony finally ended, the wheelchair handover began.

At the handover ceremony. I  was the only American on the stage. Two other local church leaders from the Inti Raymi Stake sat to his right and also spoke along with him.

Recipients of the chairs were pre-screened to verify their true level of need (poverty) and disability. This earlier evaluation enabled the handover to go more quickly than it might have gone otherwise.

Traditional grandmother who received a wheelchair. As we adjusted her chair, her daughter had to help translate our Spanish into Quechua, the only language the grandmother understood.

The mayor of Ollantaytambo (standing next to Marshall) brought in this group of disabled seniors from his village near Machu Picchu. Some received the standard wheelchair while others got the 'rough rider' that can traverse harsher terrain.  All of these recipients only spoke Quechua, so the mayor had to translate.

Each recipient was evaluated to determine the correct chair and the adjustments required. The serial number of each chair was recorded, along with the recipient's personal data, to allow follow-up later and ensure the chairs would be used for their intended purpose rather than being sold later on the open market. (They even fingerprinted the recipients to ensure they were who they said they were).

Of the 100 wheelchairs available, most recipients had been evaluated previously so the handover was supposed to go smoothly. However, more people showed up than what there were chairs to accommodate. That is always disappointing to people who waited for half a day, hoping to get a wheelchair. We hope there might by a second phase to this project in the future to take care of the needs that still exist.

Evaluators and Maintainers for the Future

The handover was on Wednesday, but the other four days of the week were devoted to training a local group of students in techniques for evaluating wheelchair recipients to make sure they get the correctly sized and adjusted wheelchair. Along with this course was taught repair techniques to maintain and repair wheelchairs. The church provided a host of repair/replacement parts, and the course focused on the fact that repairing is a much more sustainable approach than continuing to purchase new chairs.

Evaluators/maintainers busy at work restoring a worn-out, broken-down wheelchair.

The course participants were from the Municipal Office for the Attention of Persons with Disabilities (Oficina Municipal de Atención a la Persona con Discapacidad - OMAPED) in Cusco. This is the first time in this city that they have attempted anything like this - repairing and maintaining broken wheelchairs as well as handing over the new chairs we provided.

Nothing is more fun than making an old and broken wheelchair new again.

We had asked people to bring broken chairs to the class. During this part of the training, we fixed 10 broken wheelchairs, all of which were returned to service for disabled people.

Group of repaired chairs. Can you pick out the only new one in the bunch? (Hint: it is on the end)

Course graduates displaying some of their fully restored wheelchairs.

We provided the new wheelchairs, tools, repair parts, and training (through our INR partner). OMAPED (the local Cusco group) provided the people to attend the course. They also coordinated the new wheelchair handover and also were in charge of all transportation charges to get the two truckloads of wheelchairs, tools, and repair parts sent on the 18-hour journey to Cusco.

This is the way we foster self-reliance, and we hope this project can continue into the future. Locals are empowered to grow and help themselves. When this happens, we count this as a long-term success.

Elder David and Sherri Jones (wheelchair specialists from Texas, back left), Elder Marshall and Sandy Henrie (next to the Joneses), the four instructors from INR in Lima, and the rest of the course of graduates from OMAPED celebrated a successful beginning to a future of help for the desperately poor and disabled persons in Cusco, Peru.

Final shot from Cusco - the sun sets high in the mountains of this ancient city.

As we leave Cusco, we pray that our labors here in this ancient city will bear fruit and provide a long-term solution to the desperately poor who are often times forgotten and invisible in their home-bound state.

Would Jesus have been doing something other than this?