"If they don't work, they don't eat"

Father Alex asked Ben and I to film some of the activities around the Mission over the past couple of days. We were getting shots of the team integrating into the Mission's activities and taking general film of the various programs of the Church. Needed to get a few shots of the clinic, I asked Adon (Father Alex's right hand man) to drive me down for about ten minutes of filming.

After completing my assigned footage, I walked out to find Adon waiting by the van to drive me back up to the Mission's volunteer house. "Do you think it would be okay if we took this lady back to her house?" Adon said to me - pointing to a woman sitting in her wheelchair only about 3 meters away. So, Adon and I loaded her and her son into the back of the van and drove her to one of the poorest invasion communities in Alto Cayma - an area that sits in a canyon just off the runway of the airport.

The woman had been at the Mission for the monthly CFCA, Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, food distribution program and she had no money to take a taxi back home. When we got to her house, a small concrete block home with the aluminum sided roof, Adon began to tell me of their story. She is in her thirties and suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis. Unable to walk, she lives most of her days in a wheelchair. She has three children, a boy aged 10 and two girls aged 13 and 14. Her husband left the family almost two years ago. Her only source of income is to sell food on the side of the road for a few soles a day. Her oldest child has left school to work full time for the family. Adon told me that he is concerned that the other two children will be leaving school very soon as well.

On the drive back to the Mission Adon told me that he felt the lack of educational opportunities and the need for families to have their children go to work very early in their educational careers, is one of the main reasons that people in the community of Alto Cayma get "stuck" in poverty. He told me that there is a constant drain of young people leaving school with very few formal skills and little education - and this is devastating to the community. Adon went on to say that for many of the people living in the poorer communities of Alto Cayma - "if they don't work, they don't eat."