Growing old in the hills of Nueva Esperanza, southeast of Lima, Peru,  has never been easy, even before the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. This settlement in the district of Villa María del Triunfo was established in a sandy area in the 1950s as a solution to the housing problem in lower-income sectors. Its name—which translates as New Hope— reflected a project: to build an industrial park on state-owned land. Attracted by this future, hundreds of tradesmen, welders, carpenters, and artisans—most of them Quechua-speaking—began to populate the land, especially in the 1990s. That promise of progress, however, was never fulfilled for them.

Paulina watches the city from her home // Paulina observa desde su casa la ciudad

A long time has passed since then. Today, much like the more than a thousand human settlements that exist in Lima, Nueva Esperanza is, above all, an enormous handful of houses of plywood and calamine spread from the slopes to the top of the hills, connected by dirt roads and stairways that the neighbors built together as a community. Here there is no sewage system, water comes in tanker trucks, and the poorest homes are still lit at night by candlelight.

It is there, in those hills, where several of the more than 700,000 older adults who live in poverty in the country live (survive). Peruvians who could be our fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers. Peruvians who we count as part of that “vulnerable population,” because they face the highest risk of illness and death in the days of the virus.

Their lives reflect what happens when society as a whole—the state, companies, citizens—does not take care of its elderly. Today, a year after the pandemic began in Peru and in the midst of the second wave of infections, six out of every ten of the 41,000 older adults living in Villa María del Triunfo do not receive a retirement pension and 31% do not have access to a single health system. For many, working years beyond retirement age is normal (40% of Lima’s elderly population still works), as is learning to live with chronic ailments, such as arthritis, hypertension, asthma, diabetes, tuberculosis, among other ailments that they cannot treat, because sometimes they do not have health insurance or cannot walk to a health post or because they only speak Quechua or live alone or do not have the money to see a doctor.

The Covid-19 pandemic—its strict quarantine, its very high mortality rate—has only deepened the cracks of precariousness in which they already lived. This is well known to the older adults of Nueva Esperanza, such as Paulina, Vicente, Lucila, Guillermo, Doris and Justiniano, whose experiences during the pandemic will be told here. Unlike other Peruvians their ages, they were somewhat lucky: They did not suffer nightmarish circumstances, with hospitals overflowing, they survived. During this year, the virus has killed 65,000 older adults, according to the National System of Deaths (Sinadef), 70% of the total coronavirus-related deaths.

They are the “at risk population” who were forced to make more sacrifices in their already difficult lives. Some did not receive financial aid from the government, and the little money they received from their relatives was cut off due to unemployment caused by the emergency. So they clung to the communal meals and the solidarity of their neighbors, and planted more potatoes and vegetables in their gardens, and every day they watched from the top of the hill, waiting. Not for the vaccine—which, according to the government, will come very soon for them—but the day when they will be able to go out and live their lives—what is left of their lives—as before.

PAULINA

67 years old

Paulina’s story is one of a community midwife who left Huancavelica with her children in search of better opportunities.  Paulina Peñaloza Campos faced off the pandemic and protected herself from the virus by quaranting herself with her children and grandchildren, while she missed “seeing the outside world.” As she had worked all her life in the fields and at home, she does not receive a retirement pension.

Paulina waters her small farm in front of her house with a bucket of water. // Paulina riega con un balde con agua su pequeña chacra que tiene frente a su casa.

To protect herself from the virus, she puts eucalyptus leaves inside her face mask. She trusts the healing power of plants. Whenever Paulina feels sick, she prepares a eucalyptus tea, a habit she maintains since the pandemic started, when her body and head suddenly began to ache. Perhaps that’s why she has never taken any pills nor has visited a hospital nor intends to do so. In her hometown Tayacaja, Huancavelica Region (“the last fold in the Andean puna,” as she describes it), there was no health center. “People used herbs to cure everything,” she says.

Like so many Quechua-speaking adults in Peru, she has always distrusted the frail public health system in the highlands where she grew up. “Maybe I could be cut to pieces by doctors,” Paulina says amid laughter. She belongs to a place where she has heard stories about indigenous women being forcibly sterilized during Fujimori’s regime (1990-2000). Possibly, she says, that’s why she became a midwife in Tayacaja.

Paulina has an excellent memory and recounts her childhood in detail. She remembers her parents and the ollucos, the mashua, the coca and quinoa her family grew. Drinking water was collected from springs under the bluest sky. But, then, she is also struck by the memories of “plagues” that hit her hometown. Among these, a cow-transmitted disease that killed her elderly parents. “Before, plagues mainly caused children’s death,” she warns, “unlike this virus that kills people like me.” Several of Paulina’s siblings died before she was born. She gave birth 14 times: seven survived, and seven died of various ailments. “Some died at birth, others while they were babies, or when they were toddlers,” Paulina says. “But such was life then.”

Only two daughters live in Huancavelica. The rest left for Lima, Peru’s capital, one by one, to work as house painters. Paulina was always aware of the great needs many people from her hometown suffered in the capital city. “Why are you going to Lima, if people don’t even have money to eat?”, she told her eldest son to dissuade him from leaving. “I cried, but he told me that he only wanted to make more money and left.” Only her last son convinced her to travel together to Lima. It was the first time Paulina traveled by car. She was 50 years old. At every turn Paulina thought she would die. Finally, she arrived to Lima, dizzy and with a headache.

It took her a while to get used to the city. “Every day I saw the massive number of cars. Are so many possible? What kind of place is this?”, she remembers thinking. “Dwelling on Lima’s mountains looked hollow and resembled birdhouses.” She now shares with two granddaughters a prefabricated wooden house with a tin roof. Three of her children live in neighboring houses. Since she has always plowed the field and worked at home, she doesn’t receive any retirement income. “My children support me,” she says, “and that’s why I’m alive.”

Before the pandemic, each one used to give her 50 soles a week (about US$ 13.50). With that, Paulina prepared lunch and maintained some independence. But due to lockdown, her two sons and son-in-law lost their jobs as house painters and construction workers and could only give her small amounts of money every now and then.

Paulina, along with the goat that her son gave her after her husband passed away. // Paulina, junto con a la cabra que su hijo le regalo luego que fallecio su esposo.

“One day, when I came home, I found mom crying,” says Eugenio, Paulina’s eldest son. She had run out of food a few days ago but had not said anything. Now, they all try to buy food together and share meals. For lunch, they prepare a rice and potato soup, and —when possible— they add beef or chicken. Her grandchildren visit to help her out with cleaning and cooking. Only one of Eugenio’s stepsons received a 760-soles assistance bonus. That was a short-lived relief.

Now Paulina sees her sons and grandchildren more often. She feels that they take care of her and that makes her feel better, although she longs for the outside world. “My children don’t want me to leave home. She can no longer meet with other people nor visit them or go anywhere, except a small nearby store. Not even the church nor the market,” she complains. Sometimes she entertains herself by feeding a goat that her son gave her after she became a widow.

“I was very sad, and he brought me the kid. I have raised the goat with bottles,” Paulina recalls. She still hasn’t named it. “My children bring corn husks, and, with that, I sit down to feed the goat. While it eats from my hand, I remember my hometown.”

VICENTE

75 years old

He was seven years old when his mother, before dying, left him in the care of a restaurant owner in Lima.  Vicente Vargas Valenzuela learned to read and write late; he was 15 years old when he first went to school. With much effort, he managed to buy a little plot of land in Villa María del Triunfo. In spite of his age, he continues to work because he doesn’t have insurance or a retirement pension. “I can’t be lazy. My bones would get rusty,” he says.

Vicente, helped kill a pig that will be sold in local markets // Vicente, ayudo a mata un chancho que sera vendido en los mercados locales

He doesn’t remember much about his childhood. Only that his father left before he was born and that his mother died of a serious illness. “That’s what I’ve been told,” says Vicente, also known as “Chavito” by his friends. Despite these experiences, he still has the smile of a mischievous kid and shrugs his shoulders whenever he talks about himself, as if he were bashful.

Vicente Vargas Valenzuela was born in Huaral’s higlands, in the northern part of Lima Region. Before dying, his mother left him with a restaurant owner in Surquillo District, in the capital city of Lima. Vicente was seven years old when he started working. He recalls that he was so small that he dropped the dishes and cried. But the restaurateur did not scold him. He was rather his “half-father, half-boss,” the person who gave him a home, food, and tips for his work.

He started attending school when he turned 15, and only finished first grade. Vicente already knew how to read “a bit,” but he was arrested for accompanying a friend who planned to rob his school, an incident he prefers not to remember. Once he left the police station, the school banned his return. “Due to this bad influence, I lost my opportunity,” Vicente admits. He then tried to start over; this time, working in the pig farm his “half-father, half-boss” had in Nueva Esperanza.

Eventually, the then-young Vicente was able to sell some pigs and, with that money, buy some land in those mountains. More than 30 years have passed since then. He never married nor had children. “Fortunately, because life is so expensive,” he says. He doesn’t receive a retirement pension, nor has a bank account, nor health insurance. Vicente has learned to live with the pain of an inguinal hernia, and he did not dare ask the doctor how much the operation would cost. Neither has he treated the varicose veins on his legs that hurt when he walks, nor his kidney ailments, although the doctor warned him that these could “explode.”

Despite everything, he continues to work. Every day he helps a friend feed his animals in a pigsty near his house in Nueva Esperanza. When garbage trucks arrive from Lima’s markets, Vicente classifies vegetables for personal consumption and those that are for pigs and cows. Amid flies and pungent odors, he fills 20 buckets of feed a day. He doesn’t earn a salary; rather, the pigsty’s owner provides him food and 20 soles (US$5) a week. Sometimes, he receives a pig as a gift. For Vicente, that’s better than nothing. “I need to do something, anything,” he says. “I cannot be a bum. My bones would rust.”

Vicente loads gallons of water to prepare the feeding of the pigs that he is in charge of // Vicente carga galones de agua para preparar la alimentacion de los chanchos que tiene a su cargo

A few months ago, Vicente got sick and stopped working for two weeks. His stomach and body hurt. His friend, the pigsty owner, took him to a hospital and paid for his recovery. He had a gastrointestinal infection and had to rest at home; his neighbors visited him and brought him soup. Once he recovered, he found out that a neighbor had gossiped that he had that disease and that no one should come near him. Vicente knew that others had died from coronavirus in the pigpens at the other side of the mountain, but he did not have any first-hand accounts of infected people. Neither he nor his neighbors had stopped working during the pandemic.

“Why should I be afraid of that virus?”, he says. “We’re all healthy here.” Vicente is not afraid of getting infected because he’s worried about another plague: swine disease. Worse than other years, it started impacting pigsties during the past few months. He saw how the eight piglets delivered by his only sow—one by one—, started dying. He had invested his covid-bonus to fatten these and sell them at a good price for Christmas. Instead, he had to burn their corpses at the dumpsite.

Nevertheless, Vicente feels grateful because he hasn’t lost his job during Peru’s COVID-19 crisis. Sometimes, at night, he sits outside his house to talk with neighbors, or he visits the soccer field. The daughters of a restaurant owner (his “half-sisters”) bring him fruit or encourage him to live with them. But Vicente prefers to keep and take care of what he considers his own: his land, his plywood house, his bed, and the chest of drawers where he keeps the pigs’ feed. Moreover, he has recently adopted a puppy he found among a heap of trash. “I will be here until God asks for me,” he says. “When he allows me to die, I will happily leave.”

LUCILA

80 years old 

Lucila Común Rivas has already survived a pandemic: she contracted polio in the late 1950s. Before Covid-19, she helped her daughter sell breakfasts, but the virus changed everything.  A few weeks before, she had been excluded from the Pension 65 program because the state considered that she did not live in a poverty-level home. This was based on the fact she had shared her electrical connection  with a neighbor and her electricity bill went up, disqualifying her. Today she faces the pandemic from the small rooms of her house, with her daugher, without going out.

Lucila in front of her house where she has been for the last year without going out due to the pandemic // Lucila frente a su casa donde ha estado el ultimo año sin salir debido a la pandemia

She is one of the hundreds of Peruvians who contracted polio before the vaccine was developed in the late 1950s. That disease left her with a disability at age nine, and she has since used a walking stick. Born into a family of farmers from Huancavelica Region, early on in childhood she learned the traditional art of spinning and weaving. “Mi mother taught me how to weave ponchos and clothing with patterns, designs, and the like,” she recalls. “I spun and sold these pieces to help out my family”.

Her abilities with textiles also helped her out when she raised, alone, her five children. She sold the clothing she wove or exchanged favors with her neighbors. “I would always help them out and, in turn, they would plant corn in our field,” Martha, her youngest daughter, remembers. At a very young age, she came to this part of Lima to work.

A decade ago, in Huancavelica, Lucila fell while walking in the rain and, since then, she has not been able to walk well. Without an ID card, like so many Quechua-speaking adults in Peru, she did not receive medical attention through the Integral Health System (SIS, or the acronym for this program in Spanish). So, her children relocated Lucila to Martha’s house in Nueva Esperanza, Lima, where they now live together and sleep in beds next to each other. “I worked only to support my mother,” says Martha, single and without children. She took the responsibility to take her mother to a private physical therapy center.

With her help, Lucila could also obtain her ID card in 2012, after several bureaucratic procedures that even required Martha to travel to Huancavelica to get her mother’s birth certificate. As a result, Martha could affiliate her mother to SIS, a timely decision because Lucila then suffered another accident: she fell from her bed and fractured the femur. She received a wheelchair and painkillers at the hospital where she was attended, but doctors stated that they could not do more due to her advanced age.

With her ID card, Lucila also affiliated to the Pension 65 Program (a bimonthly payment of 250 soles or US$ 66 for poor senior citizens), but only for a year and a half. Just before the pandemic struck, Lucila says, she was excluded from the program because the state considered that she did not live in a poor household. Martha had started sharing her electricity connection with a neighbor and because the electric bill increased sharply, the State disqualified her. For the same reason, Lucila has not been able to join Contigo, a new social program that provides retirement pensions to poor people with disabilities.

Lucila having lunch in her kitchen // Lucina almorzando en su cocina

During pre-pandemic times, Martha supported the household by selling breakfast on the avenue just below the mountain where they live. Fearing contagion, authorities prohibited this activity, and she stopped working during the first lockdown (March 16-June 30, 2020) and lived on her savings and ate at the soup kitchens. With the 760-soles bonus (or US$ 202), she could resist until the end of Covid-19’s first wave, but she had nevertheless depleted the capital for her breakfast business. She now earns a living cleaning a couple’s house in Surco District and receives S/ 240 a week (US$64), just enough to continue covering household expenses, even if that means seeing her mother much less.

Martha says that maybe that’s why Lucila has become “more depressed.” At times, she is cheerful, but “she has outbursts” and then turns silent.

In Nueva Esperanza there are no sidewalks nor paved roads, nor ramps for people with physical disabilities. Before the Covid-19 emergency, Lucila (who seldom uses her wheelchair) used to go to the grocery store at the corner using the strength of her arms to propel herself forward. If she had to go further, she would ask the neighborhood boys to help her get into a motorcycle cab. But with the arrival of the new coronavirus to Peru, Lucila’s world shrunk even more.

She could no longer go out during lockdown because of the risk of contagion. “She became sad,” Martha recalls. When she explained the situation to Lucila, “she cried because she did not understand.” She also stopped visiting the hospitals where she received the medicine to relieve her leg pain because she is aware that health centers are saturated by Covid patients and she’s afraid of getting sick.

Now Lucila spends her days between the house’s two rooms and garden, where she cooks with firewood and feeds her turkeys and laying hens. But, if she could run her own business, says Martha, things would be different. She could buy her mother those pills that strengthen memory and diminish pain. Above all, they would spend more time together, talking and weaving for hours, like they used to.

GUILLERMO 

90 years old

The man who chews coca leaf and reads his fortune in the leaves, Guillermo Urbano Condori, is a survivor of the terrorist violence in Ayacucho. He came to Lima looking for peace and set up his home there. But the pandemic shattered his fragile domestic budget. His only income is the 380 soles he receives in pension for his work in the mines 60 years ago. Before Covid-19, his children were employed in informal work that they lost during the health crisis.

Guillermo observes the city with his son and daughter who have lost their jobs due to the economic paralysis in the pandemic // Guillermo observa la ciudad junto a su hijo e hija que han perdido sus trabajos por de la paralizacion economica a causa de la pandemia

As family tradition goes, Guillermo Urbano Condori starts his day reading his fortune with the coca leaves he retrieves from a pocket. Broken leaves, for example, are bad omens, and those that fall and show their brighter side foretell good luck. “Today things will go awry,” he laments to himself during a January afternoon while he chews coca leaves by his home’s entrance in Nueva Esperanza, which is the house of the eldest of his six children: a wooden structure with a tin roof from which the ocean can be seen afar.

For as long as he can remember, Guillermo has chewed coca leaves almost every day. It’s one of his habits. He used to chew coca when he was young, while taming bulls in Ayacucho Region’s highlands. And he also consumed coca during his twenties, working in Southern Lima’s mines, where he left coca leaves as an offering to the spirits that dwelled underground. And he chewed coca when he was lieutenant governor in Mayo Luren, his hometown, which was then a battlefield between the Shining Path and the Sinchis, an elite police force. “Coca is life,” he says, “and it provides you strength.”

Even during the pandemic lockdown, Guillermo has continued chewing on his favorite green leaves, but he no longer goes down to the San Francisco market to buy these, as he used to do. Because he’s afraid of contracting COVID-19, he also stopped meeting other elderly friends from his neighborhood to talk and drink. “But he wants his sweet coca,” says Hipolito (67), his eldest son, who provides Guillermo a quarter of a kilo every couple of weeks.

Hipolito says his father has become softer over the years: he laughs more and rarely gets upset. He is in good shape, although he sometimes forgets things and has trouble hearing. That’s why he speaks loudly. When the pandemic started, his father had a hard time understanding why he couldn’t leave home. “He did not believe in lockdown,” Hipolito says, “and said that curfew was only at night” as it was during the 1980s, the most difficult years of terrorism in Peru.

Guillermo remembers when Shining Path terrorists came to his town and started killing local leaders and Quechua-speaking farmers like him. They usually used knives or machetes to save bullets that could be used against the police. “We were easy to kill,” he recalls, “because they didn’t waste bullets on us.”

One day, the Sinchis summoned Guillermo to the main square. There, he saw dozens of manhandled and beaten townspeople. “Which ones are terrorists?”, they asked, ready to execute whoever he identified. Guillermo was moved by the sight of a moribund young man. And decided to act as if he were an important military representative and ordered the police to free everyone. To his surprise, the police abided. But peace was short-lived. Soon after, Guillermo saw that people were being killed, slit by the throat, and that snipers shot villagers from one mountain to another; houses were looted and cattle massacred. People began to flee as best they could.

Guillermo and Hipolito in front of their house, burning “garbage” after moving earth to expand the land of their house. // Guillermo e hipolito frente a su casa, quemando “basura” luego de estar moviendo tierra para ampliar el terreno de su casa.

Hipolito, his son, left for Lima first. Guillermo stayed to finish his term as lieutenant governor, but when Shining Path terrorists started kidnapping young children and women, he left with her daughter Lucy, then 13 years old, because he was terrified of losing her. He is now one of the thousands of Ayacucho citizens who migrated to Lima’s poor neighborhoods and remember those atrocities. Even today, in old age and amidst the new uncertainties created by the pandemic.

Today, Guillermo and his children live together in Nueva Esperanza, and he’s the only one with a stable income, his small pension. His household’s economy was already hit before the Covid emergency. Hipolito, a welder, has a hernia that doesn’t allow him to work and his repair shop is closed. Lucy, his sister, cannot travel to other regions to sell her woven pieces. Guillermo’s savings and the 760 soles (US$ 202) they received from the state ran out during the first weeks of lockdown.

To do something, Hipolito spends hours leveling the land in front of his house, whenever his body allows him to. “Maybe, I could rent it to a motorcycle cab driver.” Guillermo oversees this work. And sometimes they remember Ayacucho: how they sowed the field with oxen and harvested potatoes and quinoa; enough food for one year. At night, they watch television together. Hipolito puts “El Chavo del Ocho,” a Mexican comedy program from the 1970s, for Guillermo to watch from his bed and hears him laugh until he falls asleep.

DORIS

72 years old

For the last ten years, Doris Romaní Villanueva has directed one of the 198 soup kitchens in Villa María del Triunfo, but the health crisis forced her to shut the kitchen down for five months to avoid contagion. The measure was a blow for many families. Her only income is now from the pigs, hens and ducks that she raises in a shed. In her spare time, she reads used books she buys in the market. Sometimes she sings songs in Quechua to ease her sadness.

Doris sitting in her room in her room located in the shed where she raises her animals // Doris sentada en su habitacion en su cuarto ubicado en la chancheria donde ella cria a sus animales

She graduated from high school at 38—the accomplishment of a dream she had postponed several times. As a child, she was a good student at the Acobambilla elementary school, in the highlands of the Huancavelica region, until one day a woman arrived to her town and that changed her life. “She was very elegant—she wore a coat and a velveteen hat,” she recalls. “I thought she was the wife of a mining engineer.”

That lady turned out to be her biological mother who had left her when she was a baby under her grandmother’s care. And that day, she took Doris to Pisco to live with her new family. Doris did not want to leave her grandmother, her “only mother,” yet, in the end, they convinced her: she would have a better life on the coast, they said; there, “everything was made of gold.”

Nevertheless, in Pisco, that woman made her work: Doris cleaned the house and took care of her step-siblings. A year later, she fell ill with tuberculosis. And, then, her mother informed her that there was no money for her studies and forced her to sell shrimp sandwiches to truckdrivers on the road to Lima. When Doris turned 16, fed up with the mistreatment, she ran away in the truck of a woman who used to buy her sandwiches. In Lima, Doris started selling milk and cheese. Soon after, she fell in love with a young man and had two children. But her partner was abusive and did not want her to study. It took Doris several years to finally find the courage to leave him.

Once free, Doris worked during the day and studied at night in a public school. When she finished high school, she studied food industries in a technical institute for women. Three years later, she became an intern at Gloria, Peru’s largest company in the milk industry, this time in the southern region of Arequipa. “I enjoyed everything about food processing,” she says, “especially making yogurts and cheese; how to plan and organize.”

When she returned to Lima at age 42, she couldn’t find a job where she could demonstrate her new skills. Employers considered her “too old.” Despite that, she worked in a cafeteria at the Navy, but lost her job during the wave of layoffs caused by the “Fujishock” [a harsh macroeconomic restructuring program applied in the early 1990s]. Doris then decided to raise domestic animals, something that had helped her support her children as a single mother. While looking for land to carry out this activity, she arrived to Nueva Esperanza

Doris’s room located at the back of her pen where she raises her animals // Habitacion de Doris ubicada en la parte trasera de su chancheria donde cria sus animales

She now has a shed where she raises pigs, chickens, and ducks. Next to it, she has built a wooden house with a tin roof, as most homes in this area, without running water nor electricity. Before the pandemic, Doris earned 450 soles (US$119) a month selling her animals to middlemen, and 350 soles more (US$93) selling pound and birthday cakes, or as the main cook for weddings and other celebrations. But these sources of income have disappeared. In addition to pandemic troubles, a disease affected pigs during 2020 and four out of her six piglets died. Yet, Doris spends her time helping families who are in need.

From Monday to Saturday, for the past ten years, Doris has been running a soup kitchen that sells a three-soles menu (less than a dollar) made up of dishes such as rice with lentils + chicken broth. Due to the Covid-19 emergency, the soup kitchen had to shut down for five months to prevent contagion, thus affecting 25 families. During that time, several Nueva Esperanza families raised white flags on their roofs to warn that they were going hungry.

When the soup kitchen finally reopened, the municipality no longer provided donations. Doris had to invest her Covid-19 state bonus to support it. She does not receive a salary for her work (nor is beneficiary of the Pension 65 Program), but at least she has food every day and the satisfaction of helping others.

Whenever she has some free time from her responsibilities at the soup kitchen or raising animals, Doris reads the used books she buys at the market. She enjoys Peruvian history or classics by Jules Verne or Victor Hugo. Sometimes she sings in Quechua, her mother tongue, such as the song that tells the story of a mother with “a heart of stone” who abandoned her child. She learned it from an uncle when she was a little girl and has since sung it with that “elegant woman” in mind. Singing, she says, helps her heal the wound.

Doris takes a break in the popular dining room that she takes care of cooking daily to feed the neighbors // Doris toma un descanso en el comedor popular que ella se encarga en cocinar diariamente para alimentar a los vecinos

A few years ago, she sang that song in Acobambilla, her hometown, along with a cousin who played the guitar. It was the anniversary of the school where she had studied. “When I went to the amphitheater to perform, I saw my name on the marquee and started crying,” Doris recalls. “My daughter had come to see me and said, ‘Mother, I have always admired you, but now I admire you more.’”

JUSTINIANO

66 years old

Last year, during the first year of Covid-19, the amancae flower did not bloom in Nueva Esperanza. It did not rain enough, says Justiniano Malca Martos, who has lived there for the past two decades. Since he and his wife María built a plywood house by the mountain top, Justiniano has enjoyed watching these yellow and pink flowers blossom in the middle of Lima’s gray winter.

Justiniano, his wife and their grandson, watering the small fields in front of their house. // Justiniano, su esposa y su nieto, regando las pequeña chacra que tiene frente a su casa.

The lack of rain, however, also worried them in 2020 because that translated into less water for the staples he grows at his garden: potatoes, goldenberries, bananas, pumpkins, and maize. That is, produce they urgently needed when the pandemic affected their main business: the transportation of people between Manchay and Villa Maria del Triunfo in their red Nissan van; Justiniano drove while Maria collected fares.

Seven years ago, they bought the van after closing their tire repair shop (they couldn’t afford rent). They have already lost count of the number of times they have had to fix their vehicle. The last time was just before the Covid-19 state of emergency started in March 2020. One night, their van broke down on the road and they had to sleep on the seats. They tried to continue their way the next day, but the battery was dead. A few hours later, then President Martin Vizcarra declared a nationwide lockdown. “We only had 50 soles (US$13) in our pockets,” Maria says. “We did not know what to do.”

Therefore, they decided to focus on their garden, but rains did not arrive. They continued irrigating their crops every eight days with water they would buy from the tanker truck, but it proved too expensive (five soles or US$1.30 per cylinder). Then, a fungal plague attacked the potatoes and eliminated all of them. They considered operating the van at half its seating capacity, as authorities required during the early phase of lockdown, but it made no sense: they wouldn’t even cover gasoline costs.

The pandemic stripped away their work and the unpredictable weather imperiled one of their food sources. They withstood the first months of lockdown thanks to a contribution from one of their sons and to the Nueva Esperanza soup kitchen. “Neighbors always help each other,” says Justiniano. “If not, we would be lost.”

Justiniano has hypertension and was hospitalized due to bronchopneumonia a few years ago. Moreover, he hasn’t completely recovered from an accident in 2017 that harmed his intestines: he was under his van repairing a part when the vehicle moved and crushed his abdomen. Although he was affiliated to the Integral Health System (SIS), he was told that his car insurance (SOAT; acronym in Spanish) had to cover his medical fees. Because his SOAT had expired, the couple went into debt for more than 20,000 soles (US$5,305) to pay for two operations. They still had instalments due when the pandemic started. “If we would fall sick with the virus, where could we get money to cure ourselves?”, Justiniano says.

Vicente harvesting in his farm that this year was attacked with a plague that did not allow him to have a good harvest. // Vicente cosechando en su chacra que este año fue atacado con una plaga que no le permitio tener una buena cosecha

He stills needs to undergo another operation but can’t cover the cost of 5,000 (or US$1,326). So, Justiniano simply bears the stomach pains that come every now and then. His recovery is uncertain and his plan to save money to build a brick and cement house, and then set up a clothing store, seems more distant every day. The couple is tired of working on the street.

During the first wave of  Covid-19, Justiniano received two bonuses (380 soles, US$101, each), which provided great relief. They bought rice, beans, some chicken and beef. And avoided leaving home. They would only go twice a week to the market. But money ran out soon. By October, overburdened by debts, they started working with their van again. To reduce contagion risk, they only made one trip a day and with fewer passengers. “We earn less, but we need to protect our health,” Justiniano says. If they used to earn 100 or 120 soles a day (US$ 27 or US$ 32), now they only receive between 30 and 40 soles for a three-hour trip.

When the Covid-19 second wave started in early 2021, they found out that other van drivers had died from the virus. Justiniano says that if they would receive an additional bonus, they would stay at home again, eating rice and beans or lentils. But, this year, his name is not on the list. He hopes that rains will start soon to work the small plot just next to the house he shares with one of his daughters and a small grandson.

“I’m from Cajamarca: we have always grown potatoes there and have brought our customs here,” Justiniano says. He only hopes it rains on the land that will feed him.