Peru

Hey everybody!  Been awhile since I’ve posted here.  Just a slight follow-up to my thesis work, I’ve been in Peru for the last two weeks, traveling from Lima, through the Gringo Trail, just finishing now in Cusco before doing the Lares Trek to get to Machu Picchu.

Today we took a bus ride from Puno, a large city on the shores of Lake Titicaca.  Like many Latin American cities, including Cusco, the city is starting to explode with informal settlements.  Ramshackle homes are starting to slowly creep their way up the mountains that surround these cities.  In Lima, the settlements stretch for miles into the desert along the shores of the pacific ocean (there were often just thatch houses in the desert, surrounded virtually by nothing). In Cusco, the homes go half-way up the surrounding mountains, which is quite strange at night, because the homes provide a  backdrop of blue and yellow lights to the formal city.

What I find interesting, is how it seems that the structures are built.  Just like what I proposed in my thesis, the buildings are built partially, over-time, and almost never reach an actual level of completion.  Rebar is left sticking up over the height of the finished ‘roof’, columns are left without concrete, and mud-brick (and masonry) is left without stucco covering.  Glass is put into window openings before anything else is completed. 

There must be some sort of policy in Peru as to why homes are left like this.  Especially here in the Andes, where in the rainy season there is quite a lot of water, you’d think families would want every opening covered and the walls completely finished.  

On Amantaní Island on Lake Titicaca, the homes are built by a newly married couple with help from their parents and family.  They start with a simple structure, and as time goes by they are able to invest more into their homes, adding on rooms (especially here, where the homestay is becoming a source of income for families), decoration and even sources of electricity like solar panels.  The home we stayed in was quite permanent, the structure of the building we stayed in was concrete, with decorations on the inside of the rooms and paint on the outside.  They also had a solar panel, so there were lights in the home in the evening.  They also had a small garden in front of their home, and a beautiful tree that grew up from their courtyard, with bright pink flowers.

Anyway, where am I going with this?  I’m not entirely sure.  I really wonder about the lives of the people who live in the thatch huts in the middle of the desert… will their homes ever reach a level of permanency like the people in Lima or Amantaní Island?  Are there mechanisms in place that allow them to do that? 

For Peru’s sake, I think this is important.  As more and more people want to live in the cities, more will want to create homes and a sense of permanency.  Without any mechanisms to allow for this, there is serious risk for people who migrant to cities and for the cities themselves, especially in places where they can barely handle the population they currently have.