Dust People

As a bilingual social worker, one of the chronic complaints I heard from educators was the plague of managing the extended absences of latino students from school, specifically during the weeks leading up to and after the winter holidays. I have witnessed countless eye rolls and groans from teachers and administrators around conference tables, bemoaning the impact of 4-, 5-, or 6-week absences from the country, and the effort involved in catching the kids up when they returned.

I dutifully defended my client families’ motivations. I repeatedly pointed out the value of seeing extended family they would otherwise never get to know; participating in family, cultural, and religious celebrations that would otherwise remain foreign; and often completing bureaucratic tasks crucial to the naturalization process. I experienced this first hand as an immigrant myself and I wouldn’t trade the experiences of those trips for all the college acceptance letters in the world.

We took one such trip about 25 years ago. We planned a side trip from Lima, Peru to the southern desert town of Nazca. The trip required an overnight trip on a pothole-riddled segment of the Pan-American Highway, seeing sunrise from the bus with stiff necks and aching gums. I don’t know if Nazca has benefited from the recent Peruvian economic growth, but in those days of Fujimori and Sendero Luminoso, I remember little about the town except for its few squalid buildings, layers of dust, roving packs of stray dogs, and a hostel that had been fashioned from a former horse stable.

En aquellos tiempos, as my father has reminded me, very few native Peruvians had the economic wherewithal to visit their country’s archaeological gems. Those tourists who could afford to visit the Unesco World Heritage site often viewed the geoglyphs from a chartered propeller plane. We did not, opting instead to view a few of the geoglyphs from observation towers. The experience was ethereal, striking, dissociative, and indelible.

While searching for a picture of one such observation tower, I was struck by the bubbling activity in this more-recent image. Our time there was so much more lonely and quiet.

One strong memory of that trip that has lingered was that of a man we encountered, sheltered by an observation tower. He had no conveyance with him anywhere in sight. Spread before him was a small blanket, dotted with his wares. Along with clay ocarinas adorned with the Nazca lines, he carved and sold polished stones bearing some of the more popular geoglyphs: the hummingbird, the spider, the condor, the monkey. His face bore deep grooves and stony features, as if he himself had been carved from the windless, unchanging desert. He didn’t say much and my parents bought a few items from him, I think mainly out of duty or obligation or a sense of pity.

He had a few belongings with him, blankets and bags bundled and stacked towards the back of the shelter. It occurred to me then that he must live there and make his living from selling trinkets to tourists, and this troubled me. Growing up in the Northern Virginia suburbs, I couldn’t fathom a society where people lived, unchecked, under observation towers. My parents gently exposed us to lots of this again and again during our various trips throughout Latin America: the children selling cigarettes and sticks of gum in Lima; the Venezuelan children scampering up coconut trees, machetes clenched in their teeth, quickly returning and popping a straw in for us to buy as cheap refreshment; the children camped out next to our hotel in Rio de Janeiro, samba dancing for spare change; the young boy who raced our charter bus up the the winding switchbacks leading up to Machu Picchu, outpacing it and coming onboard at the end, to collect applause and tips.  

We work so hard to protect and provide for our children today, but my mind has started to turn to how we, as parents, can give the boys these kinds of experiences. We venture into D.C. on occasion, and I point out soup kitchen lines in neighborhoods very different from our own, and prompt them to consider how differently children in the same country can live. I look for these opportunities in rural Virginia and tell them about my time providing family services throughout the Shenandoah Valley. It’s not enough, though.