House Visits
by Elena

I had my first house visit about a week after my family and I arrived in Peru. We had just been getting settled in with the Puma Marca school and the community, when our whiteboard schedule announced a house visit for the following Wednesday. We had been told that house visits were a way to become familiar with the community and families. Our van arrived at the school and we set out to find the family we would be visiting that afternoon, two grandparents whose lives had been changed by their kids. Their children were grown and were living in Cusco, but often came up to Puma Marca to take anything their parents had. They would take clothing, money, furniture, and even food. It’s hard to imagine they could take so forcefully from their own parents, not even caring that they were starving or dying, selfishly caring about only their own problems. The grandparents lives are so different from anything I have ever imagined that it is a little overwhelming. We brought the family some food and clothing and made sure there was someone who would cook for them. We walked up toward the streets, back to our clean house, back to a different place. We can go home and pretend we have never seen anything like this, or we can do our best to help these people. This is why we came here, even if we can only do something as small as giving them a bag full of food.



















Buying food for the home visit