Earthquake recovery: Pisco, Peru

On Thanksgiving morning I arrived in Pisco, Peru, the epicenter of an earthquake in August that registered at 8.1 on the Richter scale. To even give you an idea of what this city looked like before August would be impossible, so little remains of it. The streets are filled with rubble piles, doorframes are left standing with no buildings behind them, and cement foundations are filled with Coleman tents where many of the dislodged residents have been living since August. Some parts of the city have returned to a semi-normal way of life, but others have fallen into a sort of stasis, as there is little money to rebuild and most are out of work.

I spent several days in Pisco talking to residents, walking through half-destroyed houses, sitting in dusty tents and listening to people's accounts of the earthquake. It was sobering just to hear about the terror of what they had lived through… The quake itself was a full three and a half minutes long, an earth-shaking so violent many could only huddle and listen to the deafening sound of buildings crashing down around them, like "ice falling off a glacier". They emerged into the dark night full of dust and debris, many badly wounded and others trying to free bodies from under cement ruins, but all terrified that a tsunami would follow to wipe out everything that was left. Guided by the faint light of cell phones and candles, they fled the city on foot, walking for hours through the night to find refuge in the desert surrounds. When they eventually returned to Pisco it was only to find their lives buried under rubble heaps or their damaged homes and businesses ransacked. Later they would wander through the bodies laid out in plastic in the central square to try and identify missing family and friends… To hear these things first hand was something that a lifetime of CNN could never have prepared me for. And to understand that their lives had been changed irrevocably was heartbreaking.

Pisco has been cleaned up since August, but as foreign relief workers have left the city, the money and food that were supposed to continue arriving have disappeared. Shipments have been disbanded in Lima and the goods taken off to the black market to be sold. The prices of food and milk in stores have doubled and tripled, and the government promises help that never comes. Many of the children are badly malnourished, and almost all have respiratory problems. One man told me, "The earthquake was what we felt, what made our houses fall, but the real disaster is just beginning now that people are starting to understand that we have been forgotten."

A group of families are living in tents on the cement foundations of their former homes, right next to the cemetary. They've put up a make-shift plastic wall to keep the graves out of mind, but the kids told me that when the earthquake first happened they "didn't want to eat because the dead people smelled too bad." The skin under their shirts is red with bites from the tents that have become infested with fleas and bedbugs. Their eyes are fatigued, as the scorching coastal desert summer is arriving and their tents are too hot to sleep in as soon as the sun rises. When I pulled up here on my motorcycle they crowded around it like a mob, all making pleas for me to tell my country how bad things were and to ask them for help.

I walked through a family's house that hadn't been completely destroyed, but was a maze where one who didn't step carefully was bound to fall through the wooden planked floor. Holes in the roof were covered shabbily with scrap plywood and two youngest boys were scolded for playing in the trash-strewn rubble heap that used to be the kitchen. The father told me that when they fled the city after the earthquake they returned to their partial home to find all their belongings stolen. Now the government tells them the house must be demolished -- and that they must pay for it. There were dark circles under the man's and he said to me, "We will have nowhere to live if our house is destroyed. What will we do?"

A radiant black-haired girl named Marilu found me taking pictures on her dusty street and wanted to show me the statue of the Virgin Mary they'd put on the corner. I learned from neighbors later that this 8 year old had been pulled unconscious out of her collapsed house and recessitated, only to awake screaming that her brother was still in his room. They didn't get to him in time. Marilu now lives in a band-aid shack of plastic and wooden boards with another family (her mother lost her legs and is in Lima recovering) and clings to you like she'll never let go.

I am going back to Pisco soon, and what those worst off are most hoping for are the temporary wooden pre-fab houses with glass windows and screens, and doors that lock. I have visited the site where they are sold, and for between $400 and $700 each (depending on the size of the family), the company will transport and install the houses in Pisco. I have also talked with some local business owners to establish a voucher program for basic food needs like fruit, vegetables and milk, so that those without proper means of refrigeration can be assured fresh food.

I am trying to raise $4,500 to put five families into the wooden houses, and to provide the rest of the neighborhood with some quantity of food vouchers that might last them through the New Year. I will be handling everything there myself, so as to assure that every last cent will be converted into a home or a food voucher. If you would like to donate, you can go to http://www.paypal.com/ and use a debit or credit card to send a donation to tracymotz@hotmail.com.

Thanks... Will update with progress.

What not to do in a Chinese restaurant in Peru.

My leather motorcycle jacket is gone, stolen. It was taken off the back of my seat at a "family" Chinese restaurant in Huaraz, Peru when I got up to go to the bathroom.

This jacket was almost the only original item with me since the beginning of the trip. There were scrapes on the elbow from a bad fall in Tahoe, some on the side from Oregon, and a whole pocket full of magic rocks that a wonderfully crazy man on Jade Beach in California gave me. I will never have those same scrapes or magic rocks again.

The road will be colder now. Falls will be more brutal. I will look way less cool. I hope that those boys selling Chicklets who probably stole and then sold my jacket for twenty soles at least sent it off to a good home.

(What I really hope is that they are somehow terribly allergic to leather and got what was coming to them. I sort of doubt either happened though.)

Sniff. Goodbye motorcycle jacket. It was fun while it lasted.

No one is dancing, eating or playing table hockey.

This is where I am right now.

Tonight I drove into a town in northern Peru where on the main strip all the stores and houses are clay boxes with impossibly tall, thin, wobbly telvision antennae sticking up from tin roofs and there are many people sitting against the walls, waiting maybe, or maybe just sitting there. It is not uncommon for some people in every town to be doing this in South America, but here it is everybody. Nothing else happening aside from the sitting.

I stopped because I was very exhausted and also because it looked like a strange place.

The police didn't seem to have a lot to do. I asked two officers advice on where to stay for the night and after they could not convince me to drive to another town, they came back with the disclaimer "our hotel isn't like a hotel for tourists... it's just for the people from here." I was confused as to whether this meant I wasn't allowed to stay there since I'm not Peruvian, or that I might not find it luxurious enough since the dirt smeared on my face and the mud caked on my shoes hinted to them what a classy lady I am. I assured them that wherever "people from here" slept I would also sleep.

I got a police escort to a hotel where I paid three dollars for a barebones, concrete room with a thin matress sagging into a metal bedframe. Then I drove my motorcycle into a cavernous bar/billiards hall next door where it would be kept for the night, so that none of the sitters would steal it. A round table in the dark corner was host to six men playing a game with dice, all of whom lifted their heads and turned to stare as I unloaded my luggage. The owner pulled a metal curtain with a tiny door cut into it over the entryway, so that going back out was like following the White Rabbit through Wonderland.

Up the block and around the corner I found the main plaza, empty. A megawatt PA system was blaring regaetton that no one was dancing to, and under a tent sat twelve unused table hockey tables. I looked around to see if I was the only one there who found this a little odd. I was. In fact, I was the only one there, period. Everyone else was out along the main road, too busy just sitting against the walls, waiting maybe, or maybe just sitting there, to dance or play table hockey.

Looking for dinner, I wandered in to a well lit yet deserted room that had tables and chairs and napkins like one would see at a restaurant. I stood near the entryway and shouted "Hola? Hola, buenas noches?" until a bald old man shuffled out to attend to me. I asked him if it was indeed a restaurant, and he confirmed that it was. I asked what there was to eat, and he said there was no food. "It's all gone by noon. People don't eat in the evening." This left me to ponder why a restaurant that has no food would be open, but it explained why there wasn't anyone eating there.

Down the street I passed a funeral home/food mart, where two coffins wrapped in plastic were displayed in front of shelves loaded with bottles of Pepsi, cans of condensed milk, strawberry wafers and toilet paper. There was also an arcade/food mart, and a hardware store/food mart where I bought a roll of electrical tape and a candybar. I am undecided as to whether a food mart is so lucritive a venture that you should couple it with any other use of retail space, or whether it is so unprofitable that if you are to have a food mart you must subsidize it with a secondary business. Perhaps selling food only worthwhile until noon, since apparently that's when people stop eating, so the rest of the day you have to sell coffins and hammers.

I stopped in a few other places decorated to look like restaurants, some even doing business under the label "restaurant", yet none had any food. I finally got directions to a place on the outskirts of town where I was sure to find a meal. In the end it was so far away, I realized it was the reason no one had bothered to eat all their food earlier in the day when they were eating the bald man's food, and the food of everyone else on his street. Maybe they're like bears and they eat once a day to store up fat for the rest of the day when they hibernate on the sidewalks, and this is why they cannot dance to reggaeton or play table hockey. They must eat and sit, eat and sit, nothing else.

Walking back to my concrete room I passed through a street with walls on both sides, where all that could be seen over the tops were the towering television antennae. In the dark, they appeared to be crosses. Hundreds of them. A cemetary for people whose legs are stilts and everything in their world is lanky and loft, even their grave monuments.

I don't know the name of this town and I never want to find it out. I prefer to let it melt into one of those memories that later you think maybe was a dream, or into a dream that later you think was a memory. A very strange place indeed.

Introducing, the third highest waterfall in the world!