First Interview

We took a taxi ½ hour up a dozen or so switchbacks. And as we gained elevation, I was so amazed that people actually lived on that incredibly steep mountainside. Had our car gone off the road, we would have literally fallen thousands of feet. The views were so spectacular that at one point we pulled over and took a few pictures of the sunset over the Andes. Pampas is about 12,000 ft. (higher than Timp.- and which I definitely felt on my run this morning in Hauncayo) and then we climbed another couple thousand feet to a meeting where women were repaying their loans to a staff member of PRISMA.

So I thought that Pampas was at the top of Andes. That was until our interview with a woman out in the campo tonight.
Sefarina, the woman we were supposed to interview, luckily was present at the meeting. And it was so interesting to ask her about her family and their food security. She told me that sometimes there are entire days she goes without food. She only drinks water to curb her hunger because she doesn’t have money to buy food for herself or her family. And sometimes all she eats is corn for days at a time- the only crop that she grows in her farm chacra. She also told me that everything revolves around the harvest, which is in June and July. If there isn’t a good harvest, she and her family go without food and have to find work down in town. She’s worried about the harvest this year because it didn’t rain in April at all. It’s obvious that she spoke a lot of Quechua too because I found myself repeating the questions quite a bit (that or my Spanish just sucks). Whatever it is, there is a definite language barrier.