A Teenager in Old Peru
By Mike Snyder
February 2007
In 1957, the year Sputnik set the NATO alliance to grinding its collective teeth, my family took a vote. Civil engineer Dad had another foreign assignment, this time a smelter and seaport for a copper mine in the Andes. With brother Charles and I nearing our 10th and 13th birthdays and Mom always a good sport, maybe we should all go. I was just clever enough to realize that relocation to Peru would be a great benefit to my societal education. The vote was unanimous. Destination was Ilo, a seacoast village near the Chilean border on the Atacama desert, one of the driest in the whole darn world. As in no rain, just occasional fog. BLEAK, Bubba.
Part of the preparation for this adventure was about four doctor visits for an unending battery of inoculations. The typhus one REALLY hurt, and Mom was perfectly mortified by Charles and me reciting various curses (fastidiously absorbed from our father) as we exited the House of Pain.
After an episodic journey with long layovers in Panama and Lima, Peru while our modest company house was readied, Dad gathered the family at the Arequipa airport and drove us to our new home. There was (likely Communist) labor unrest, and we were wide-eyed, passing machine gun nests as we approached Ilo. Finding a human skull in a closet of our new digs amused Charles and me but caused Mom to put on a rather tight face. What the hell has Dad gotten us into?
Ilo was one cruelly impoverished village whose only apparent native industry was a factory transforming the anchovy harvest into fish meal. (When the wind was wrong, PHEW.) Peasants lived in the so-called "seaweed village" -- dirt-floor shacks with common walls, cobbled together of any scrap materials they could gather. Naked children, an open sewer, the occasional dead dog or burro rotting in the seaside sun. Yes, I was getting all the societal education I would ever need, knowing I would never forget this place.
The company provided a teacher and one-room accredited school, grades through 8. The teacher did her best at teaching Spanish, which we kids rounded out haltingly with the local merchants.
Feeding the family was Mom's big challenge. The company provided a commissary, but meat and veggies had to be gotten at the fly-infested open-air market in town. She marinated the stringy beef and boiled it and the vegs half to death. Our housing project had plumbing, the community tank kept full of water trucked in from a nearby river, but it wanted boiling. She made our bread from scratch. Never what you could call a good cook, but kept us wholesomely nourished. One of her delights was ultra-cheap maid service by a youngster from Ilo. Erminia, too homely to arouse even this teenager's raging hormonal imbalances.
Our U.S. settlement was a couple miles from town. The company provided a school bus to haul us back and forth for shopping or recreation, and the maids to and from their toil. The Peruvian driver was Willy Flores, a friendly and compliant feller who spoke just enough English. Sometimes when the bus was nearly empty, he'd let one of us kids steer it by reaching around him from behind. I was once observed driving the thing, for which he came near to losing his job. That came near to shaming me.
Charles' and my contemporaries numbered maybe 20, of ages 10-18. In such a tiny U.S. community, the older ones couldn't be age-elitist, and social life was pretty eclectic for us all. We had a modest recreation hall where I delighted in whipping-butt on construction workers on the pool table; also an open-air theater with every weekend a movie imported from the States. Entertainment at home included a tiny pool table that sat on a card table, a phonograph for which I'd been awarded (or maybe extorted) a budget for buying 45s and LPs before we embarked, and a short-wave radio receiver. Once a week I would listen avidly to a one-hour rock'n'roll broadcast from the States while Dad made horrible faces and Mom told him to SHUSH. The general store in Ilo (owned by a Chinese family, of course) was marvelously packed with every item imaginable, including the firecrackers all us kids absolutely required.
Less benign attractions flourished, including a putative brothel (never mind; I'm only 13), cigarettes ("Inca" brand wheezers), and a saloon. On a dare, I bought and drank a bottle of beer in this dive -- no law against it, and everybody from the U.S, no matter how young, was deferred to.
Once a month the bookmobile would miraculously appear and be swarmed by hungry buyers. This was important in servicing the family addiction to Pogo Possum. I still have a damfine collection of those books.
After 10 months of this adventure, the family returned to the States with my education forever burned into my mind. At a crusty old pier built who knows when, actively-rusting Grace Lines freighters would bring supplies. Most of that seemed to be endless piles of ammonium nitrate explosive in big black steel cans, destined for the mine. Our family happily anticipated sailing home on one of these when Dad's commitment was finished. But his irritable attitude got him crosswise of the management and we had to leave early, via airlines. Too bad.
Of course, as part of our South America acclimation, the family endured the gastric adjustment we all called "the Inca two-step." The ironic part was that we repeated it upon returning home.
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