First week in Cusco

I am finally starting to be up to date with this page, as I will now start to tell you a bit about my first week here in Cusco...

We arrived last saturday Tiphaine, Celeste and I, with no real idea of what we were going to find here... Well Cusco is a beautiful city. Just like Arequipa, it is set in the heart of green mountains, and consequently pretty high in altitude: around 3,400 meters. Today, Cusco has about 300,000 inhabitants, which is about three times more than what the city had 20 years ago...Well, turism did its job, and not always a nice one...

The city itself is a piece of art, with its colonial buildings, mixes of wood balconies and white stones, old churches built in an harmony of red rock and golden embellishments, its large plazas where Cusqueños come to rest on benches or just to go about their businesses, selling all sorts of "100% Alpaca clothes"... Well, you have more chance to find 100% Alpaca in the souks of Marrakesh than on those street merchants stands. If you are lucky, you will end up with a mix of silk and lama hair. If not, congrats, you just bought yourself a great acrylic jumper...! No need to travel that far for that, H&M does just as great a job!

I could only feel glad that this was the place we had decided to spend the next 3 weeks... I looked forward to walk the narrow (and steep, very steep!) streets, try the lovely taverns and restaurants of the place, and of course, discover Cusco surroundings that host the very famous Machu Pichu, but also the Sacred Valley, the Choquequiraw temple, and so on and so forth... But most importantly, I looked forward to finally start the one thing for which we were to spend so long here... Our volunteer work at the Missionares de la Caridad, operated by the sisters of Mother Teresa, who take care of handicaped Children and orphans (most of the time they are both), and elders left without family or simply to sick to be taken care of by their own...

Our first meeting with the sisters was quite an experience by itself. After being shown the way by an infinitely kind Carmelite mother, resident of a convent close to our hostel, we arrived at the center where a boy, who could have been in his 20s (his clear handicap made it hard to tell) openned us the door. He led us to the head sister in charge of the center, a tiny Indian woman who nevertheless transpired the strength of her devotion... She looked almost angelic in her white "dress" bordered with blue linen, outfit caracteristic of the sister of Mother Teresa. She looked very pleased with our intentions to come and help for a few weeks. Apparently, help is pretty scarce around here, and volunteers are never numerous enough to handle all the work that needs to be done in the center. We were soon to discover for ourselves that it was, indeed, a lot of work to take care of all those persons, who had not a glimpse of autonomy and whose life depended completely on the good cares of the sisters.

She shown us around the center, introduced us to the people we were gonna be working with. Mostly, we were to help with the children, for the majority handicaped to the point of not speaking, not moving, hardly understanding what was said to them. She also took us through the adult quarter, where I had the first most revealing meeting. There was a person, burnt almost entirely, with 2 wide open gaps where her eyes should have been, an indinstinct shape where her nose should have stood, no lips to cover her difformed teeth range, almost no hair left on her scalp, and many, many scars all over her skin... I knew it was a she for a sister told me her name. Antonia. Well, at first, I couldnt help but take by eyes away from her, for her sight made me feel incredibly sick... but after a while, I resolved myself to look again. It took a lot of strenght to do so, but I started asking questions to the sister about her, decided to see the human in this person who had nothing left of humanity... Her name is Antonia. Antonia is 38, she has 4 kids. She was found by them in her burning house, where she had fell asleep after leaving the cooking pot on. They brought her to the hospital, with patches of her skin falling off her. They left her there and never came back. She had several operations, but none could give her back even a bit of the look she had had. Once a women, a mother, a wife, now a monster for the eyes of all.
The worst thing is, Antonia is fully conscious. She hardly speaks, but she understands perfectly well. As she understands her family left her, probably not able to look at her without disgust, or too poor to care for her now that she can hardly move, because of constant nerves shake and spasms. She also feels the full pain of her situation. The sisters cannot give her medecines every day because they are too expensive. So she gets them only when the pain is so strong she cannot possibly stand it anymore. And that¨s her day to day life.
Tiphaine helped a woman undress Antonia and laid her in her bed. I infinitely admire her for that, not many people could have dared to touch the scared skin, the rotten body of that women. But she did, and as she said, she got a sense of the human inside the monster...

Not every of our days at the center are like this one. As I said, we work mostly with Children. They are aged from 3 for the youngest, Gabriel, to 16 for the oldest, Carmela They are for the most part severely impaired, often both physically and mentally, and need constant attention. Our role is to wash them in the morning, then play with them and make hem exercise for about an hour and a half, then feed them, brush their teeth and get them ready for their afternoon nap. In the afternoon the other women working full time in the center and who are not sisters, take over. Celeste and I have been working for a week now. And every day has been more gratifying. We are starting to know each of them, their stories who are often to dark and to terrible to imagine, their diseases, often incurable or whose cures are too expensive to be undertaken, but most importantly we get to know them, outside of their dark pasts and overly present handicaps. We get to learn what they like and dislike, what makes them happy and what makes them cry... We get to learn that just like any other children, they might do things just to piss us off, or to amuse us. And for a moment, we stop considering them like handicaped kids, and we simply try as hard as we can to make them happy, to make them feel like any other kid on this earth, born without a lethal disease. And as Celeste told me one night that we were having a very deep conversation around a mango daiquiri, the one single smile those children can give you are worth more than anything on this earth...

I know my staying here for 3 weeks won-t make any difference in their life. I know they will all die way too soon and there is nothing I can do to prevent that. But if I can give them only a moment of joy, make them feel only for a moment that life for them as well can have nice surprises, then it was not all for nothing.

I am no Mother Teresa. And again, as Celeste said, doing this might be for a large share selfish, because I will never make those kids feel just as happy and as alive as they make me feel. So do not misunderstand what I wrote in this last message. There is no pride to have here. My contribution won-t change anything. It just makes me feel more conscious of my luck than I have ever felt. And for that I am infinitely grateful to those children. The real heroes here are the sisters, who every day of they lives, without interruption, attend those people and give them the attention and the affection that was taken away from them...

I have loads of things to tell you more about Cusco, about how the 3 of us got ripped off by a Tourist agency, got abandonned in the midle of nowhere and had to spend 3 days in a police station arguing with the whole world, how we still haven-t got the full money back, how we tried to find a room to rent somewhere so we could spare some money, how we met those random people with random life stories along the way, how it was all unsuccessful in the end and how we just ended up staying in our hostel, where there is a killer parrot that is trying to kill me since the day we arrived... I will tell you all that of course, and tell you about the rest of our stay here, that will not just be about working for Mother Teresa... But really, I feel that what I will remember from Cusco in the end, is the time I will have spent with those children...

So I send you loads of kisses from a beautiful place on earth, where I am having a fantastic time.

With all my Love,
Lea