Julio looked out at the pouring rain as the train sped into the Peruvian Mountains. The river was overflowing and ripping passed the train, licking the tracks as it crashed and pounded it’s surrounding terrain. He felt uneasy. The Gustavus Adolphus students were embarking on the last part of their January-term course called “Education, Healthcare and Poverty: A Service Learning Experience.” They were being rewarded with the privilege of being tourists in Aguas Calientes, the city adjacent to the Incan Empire’s masterpiece, Machu Picchu. After two-and-a-half weeks of teaching English classes and working with the local healthcare infrastructure in the desert-coastal city of Chimboté, Peru, the students were looking forward to basking in the immortality of the mountains and discovering the secrets of the Incan Civilization. However, what was supposed to be the reward for their diligence in the desert turned out to be a lesson of survival in the mountains. I sat down with Julio Zelaya, a 2008 grad of St. James High, to get the details of his experience.
On January 6th, 2010 twenty-one students and two professors from Gustavus Adolphus College embarked on their journey to Peru for their January-term class. The course was co-created by professors Mary Solburg and Deb Pitton with the goal being to expose their students to global poverty and combat it through service. The students were comprised of mainly education and nursing majors and thus were split into two major groups: educators and healthcare providers. The educators taught English classes to students age 5-14 years of age in the mornings and ages 15-adults in the evenings. Healthcare providers worked with the existing infrastructure in Chimboté. The classes were taught in “The Parish of the Perpetual Heart” started by a fellow Minnesota graduate of St. John’s University, Father Jack Davis. In their first day of classes they had over 60 students and the numbers only increased, having to eventually turn families away when there were no longer enough desks for them to sit in. “It was incredible how much they learned,” Julio says, “There was such a hunger, such an appetite for learning.”
Chimboté fell into poverty in much the same way as many cities do. At one time Chimboté was a smaller community that thrived on fishing and steel production, but in the late 1960’s the burgeoning industrialization of a particular fish called the “anchoveta” caused throngs of people to flock to the city due to high fishing wages. However, production fell when overfishing and a damaging earthquake in 1970 crippled the industry and Chimboté was left with an overflowing population left out of work, with poverty consuming them. Julio tells me that there are pockets of wealth in the city, but these wealthy neighborhoods are “…seen [by the poor] as a ‘Narnia’- A fantasy land that cannot be attained.”
Julio says that as they boarded the bus to leave the city for Aguas Calientes the entire group left with new eyes. “We were supposed to be educators,” he said, “but came out the educated.”
Leaving the desert, they boarded the bus and drove into endless sheets of rain. When they arrived in Aguas Calientes the Urubamba River, a headwater of the Amazon River, had grown to such enormity that it was chipping away at the stone barriers on the edge of the city. “Never have I seen a river so violent,” Julio tells me, “The waves [reached] up to 10 feet high when they would hit the rocks.” There was an underlying anxiety, but the group’s spirits were buoyed up by the promise of seeing Machu Picchu.
A day after getting settled in Aguas Calientes, they set out for the ruins. Their bus crawled across the only bridge that crossed the raging Urubamba to Machu Picchu. While touring, a man came and warned them that the bridge was going to collapse. The guide waved it off, but their bus driver said he wouldn’t cross back over it when it was time to head back. The group decided to cross on foot. The bridge collapsed two days later. More in the Feb. 11 Plaindealer.
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