Children in Tin Homes

I remember the first time I noticed the children living in what I saw as trash heaps on the sides of the roads while we drove from the airport to my grandparent’s home.  My father is from Lima, Peru and came to the states in college.  When I was young we would return every couple of years to visit the family, typically over the Christmas holidays.  I had been there several times before that particular year, but for some reason at age twelve was when I really started to notice and put everything together.  My grandparent’s house was on a charming street and there was a high privacy wall that surrounded the courtyard.  Behind that wall for years I had been being kissing cheeks and being fattened by the cook as I was becoming a “skinny American”.  I never noticed beyond those walls, beyond the turtle in the courtyard, the birds in their cages, the late-night parties with costumes, food and drink.

That year I during one party I recalled a memory of a party a couple years earlier.  It was a celebration for the birthdays of December and January.   There were so many people there spilling from the house into the courtyard.  As my mother would say, “everyone is coming”, this really does mean everyone!  After nightfall I was running and playing with the other children as the toddlers and babies slept on couches or piles of blankets nearby by when suddenly the ground shook, there was a loud boom and the lights flickered and then went out.  Children screamed and people started lighting candles and holding lighters up to help everyone see.  Some men in the courtyard turned the car headlights on and shown them into the house.  I couldn’t understand a lot of the words the grownups were using and I remember being confused while they just kept reassuring the children everything was fine. Radios and televisions were being turned on and everyone hushing each other so they could listen.  The party ended on that note and slowly people started picking up their children and heading home.  I later learned that the loud boom was an explosion.  A group of, at the time they called them rebels, named the Shining Path had set a bomb at electricity towers.

This trip when I was twelve started to connect many dots of memories for me as it seemed I was coming into an age of reason.  The children living in tin houses as I drove from their airport were just like me, but they lived in poverty.  Poverty at a level that I had never seen in the City of Chicago where I was growing up.  Other instances started connecting for me.  My mother took me to a mall to purchase a dress for yet another party and there, standing at the doors, were guards dressed in fatigues with rifles.  There were tanks parked outside residential homes with guards on each corner. Whenever I would try to ask why, my mother would just hush me and tell me to stop speaking English.  She feared that if someone realized we were American, we would be kidnapped.  We had a driver who went with us everywhere.  He would give us sweets and mind us while our parents shopped or had long conversations.  I later wondered if he lived in one of those tiny tin houses.

The experiences that I was able to have going to Lima every couple of years gave me a great appreciation for America.  My father was in the upper class in Lima but he still had to worry about things like bombings, kidnapping, car bombs, assassinations and just straight violence on the street unlike what we see in America.  I understood deeply why my parents worked so hard to come to America.