New understandings of 'home' come to light in Peru

COUNTRY: Peru
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT: Teaching & Construction
WRITTEN BY: Kate Elphinstone

Our third week in Cusco involved not only teaching, but home visits to the poorest students in our class. It was confronting for all of us.

Picture in your mind the home that you live in. See each room with your belongings. Know that at any moment you can go the kitchen and eat, or head to the bathroom for a hot shower. This is ‘home’ as you know it.

Now forget plaster and painted walls, forget carpet or timber floors. Forget ceilings and insulation, lights and electricity. Forget individual rooms for your lounge, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. Forget plumbing. There is running water, but it is outside, none to pleasant in the cold night air.


Now imagine that mud bricks replace the plaster and the carpet is made of dirt, flattened smooth from footsteps. The only defense between your belongings and the elements are these bare mud bricks, which can morph and crumble from too much moisture, and sheets of plastic roofing through which the sun and heavy rain falls. Being close to nature is an understatement. In this home you live and breath the earth, the dirt becomes a second skin. Now realise that for some, this isn’t fiction.

This is home for one of our students. This home, made of a single room for eating, sleeping and cooking, houses 3 people: a mother, sans husband, and her daughter aged 6 and son aged 9.

In one of the corners of this room is a pen for the guinea pigs, fattened and ready for sale. While the daughter plays with them as pets, they are also a source of income for the family- guinea pig is a specialty food dish in Peru. This home stands next to a busy road, where hundreds of tourists pass everyday.

To feed her children, this mother works at neighboring farms, or goes to the city to sell food and drink to the crowds passing by. She is just one of many women that you walk past on the street every day. Now, we have an idea of what they return to after a day in the sun or rain.

As a widowed mother, the opportunity to make an income is difficult. Centrelink doesn’t exist here, in any form. There is no Medicare to help with Doctor’s bills if they fall ill. It is an ugly reality that money is a matter of life and death. So here we stood, foreigners in a foreign home, looking at the mother and her children. We were told to ask questions. But for many of our questions, the answers were all too clear. In the night the home is freezing, and the rain leaks through the flimsy roof. We will return next week with items that she asked us for, things she alone cannot provide her children: clothes, shoes, school supplies and seeds to grow their food.

This week happened to end with Australia Day. There is no set definition of what being "Australian" means, with arguments over who and what is Australian. The sad reality is that many comments are hateful, despite our multicultural history. Non of this matters when you are standing in a mud brick home, not at all fit for the unforgiving Cusco temperature which fluctuates from hot to freezing in the space of just a few hours, if not minutes.

To enter the homes of these families, to look at the children who do not have even the basic standard of living that we have is to realise that to be born in Australia makes you, completely at random, one of the lucky ones, not more entitled than anyone else. We had no control over being born in one of the most successful and peaceful countries on earth. We could just as easily have been born here.