Day 3

Spent the morning conducting oral history interviews with secondary school student Pablo, on the left. The older gentleman (not me, the other older gentleman) is one of Pablo's subjects, 70-year-old Don Romulo. He talked about everything from the way he had to fend for himself as a child after his parents' death, to his arrival in Chacraseca in search of economic opportunity 50 years ago, to his lifetime of work tending horses and growing crops. He says he's seen some progress but that "times are tough," and that his life has always been and continues to be all about "just pushing forward."

Home is a fire. In the late afternoon, we arrived at Nuevo Amanecer, a community about 1.5 hours from Chacraseca that we visit every year. The leaders of Chacraseca have been supporting all kinds of service initiatives in Nuevo for a long time, and we've been working to connect. Nuevo is a place that faces huge challenges. Isolated and lacking in strong grassroots leadership, it's much more severely cut off from basic economic and educational resources than Chacraseca. Its well water is contaminated with dangerous levels of arsenic. Although another non-profit transports clean water in and several have been working to install rainwater cisterns and pipes to safe sources, people still get very sick on a regular basis. 

This is a place where you see deep poverty in unwashed faces, the vacant eyes of lost hope, and emaciated bodies. Tonight, we cooked chicken stew for everyone and brought the kids fireworks, hoping to light a few of the many millions of sparks it will take to build a healthy community.