One cannot visit Peru and spend meaningful time with its people and leave untouched.  Working for two days in the tiny community of Misminay, 12,400 feet high in the Andes, we found a gracious and warm spirit in these incredibly hard working people.  With no electricity and no running water, approximately 50 families here live off the land, eking out an existence much in same the way their Inca ancestors did hundreds of years ago.  

Indeed, little has changed in this village since the time of the Incas.  Cows, donkeys, sheep, dogs and pigs roam freely about the village . . . mothers carry their babies and toddlers on their backs in colorful Peruvian shawls, woven from llama and alpaca . . . men, women and older children tend to crops of corn and potatoes and quinoa by hand, without modern-day farm machinery . . . and they walk miles and miles every day with heavy loads on their backs, to and from their fields or neighboring towns for bartering.

Our arrival in Misminay was a notable event.  The townspeople had been told that two Americans were coming to help spruce up the central building in their community that is used for meetings, celebrations and important events.  Peruvians have scores of festivals throughout the year and this main gathering place is pretty much where anything important happens in Misminay.  The townsfolk also had been told we would be bringing clothes, toiletries and school supplies as well.  

With paint and supplies in the back of a small pick-up truck, we headed out from Cuzco with a driver and translator.  Neither of us speaks Spanish, the national language of Peru.  Even if we did, a translator was needed because the people of Misminay speak Quechua, a language from Peru’s pre-Hispanic times.  After a 45-minute drive through truly spectacular high plateau, with miles and miles of beautiful fields in all directions and the glacier-topped Andes beside them, we arrived at the town of Maras, which was the end of any power lines or telephone access.  From there, the truck crawled for 20 minutes up a rutted, dirt road to Misminay.  In places the trenches in the road were too deep and muddy, and the men had to push the truck up hill.

Arriving in Misminay is truly a step back in time.  It is probably one of the most beautiful and peaceful places on the planet and we relished the serenity found in a town with no noisy televisions, beepers, radios . . . just the occasional braying of a donkey, bird singing, snorting of a pig or high-pitched chatter of children.

Lots of children!  These families have five, six or more children usually.  We didn’t see many of the older ones, because they were off working in the fields.  The younger children were relatively quiet, though, a bit overwhelmed by what was going on. For some of the littlest ones, we were likely the first non-Peruvian people they had seen.  Jim’s blue eyes and Renee’s yellow-streaked hair must have looked odd to them!

The kids stared and stared, and offered only a few smiles the first day.  Most were shy and even a bit wary of us.  (This was in contrast to many of the Peruvian children we had encountered at sites frequented by missionists, youngsters who often earn a living by posing for pictures.  At these locations many have learned enough English to say, “Photo for one soles [their currency]?”  The especially enterprising kids have a baby llama tucked under their arms for true photographic irresistibility.)
By the second day the Misminay children were a little less shy, but we were still a huge curiosity.  The children are beautiful, but are covered in caked-on dirt, with torn clothes, and hands that seldom if ever are washed.  Quite the contrast to how overly sanitized everything is in our country.
After painting for a couple of hours on the first day, our translator gathered many of the local women and children and he helped us dispense the clothes, toiletries, toys and school supplies we had brought from our friends at Normandy Park Congregational Church.  It’s really hard to imagine how something as basic as a bar of soap can be so valuable!  These people have so little in terms of material things . . . pencils for the kids to write with and jackets to shut out the cold temperatures were genuinely appreciated.

These clearly are the hardest working people we have seen ANYWHERE.  They walk and walk and walk and walk, carrying huge bundles on their backs filled with potatoes, grasses for the animals, up and down these steep hills (remember, their village is above 12,000 feet).

In addition to farming, many of the men in this village serve as porters on the Inca Trail for foreigners who spend four or more days trekking in to Machu Pichu, the famous Inca ruins.  This is hard, hard work.  The porters carry extremely heavy packs and they climb up and down the mountains seemingly effortlessly, while all the non-natives are gasping for breath in the thin air at that altitude.   

The village women made us lunch both days.  A visit to the kitchen with its mud floor, firewood oven, swarming flies and utensils that are re-used over and over without benefit of soap and water made us each silently gulp.  Indeed, the hands of these women are busy all day – cooking, washing out clothes in buckets of water they have dragged from the mountain stream, making the local corn brew “chicha” and tending to children; but these same hands are, by our standards, incredibly dirty from digging crops, skinning guinea pigs (a local diet staple), tending to farm animals, and the other chores of their daily lives.  These were the same hands that cut vegetables for our soup and fried eggs for our lunch.   

At lunch outside on the grass we had the view of the truly spectacular Sacred Valley.  It is really beyond description, and of course even the camera can seldom capture nature’s true beauty.  From the village you look down across miles of fields planted with corn, potatoes and other crops, and then across the valley are the Andes, topped with glaciers.  

They showed us the school where the village children attend from age 6 to 8th grade.  To get there, the children walk in sandal-clad feet about about 10 minutes through a muddy trail filled with presents from donkeys, cows, pigs, chickens, dogs . . .you name it. After 8th grade, a truck comes to take them to a high school in Urubamba, about 45 minutes away; so they get up very, very early in the morning and come back quite late at night.

For two days we worked with some of the village men to seal the walls and then put on two fresh coats of blue paint.  Communication was limited, of course, but the universality of several smiles and hand gestures served us well.  While we worked, we were struck by how incredibly peaceful the village is.  No horns, no cars, no phones . . . nothing except natural sounds of people and animals.  The only nod to technology in Misminay is a solar phone which the mission operators from Cuzco installed, so that they can call up the village and say, "We need so-and-so number of porters on such-and-such date."   

The entire trip to Peru was fascinating.  We learned so much about the Inca people, marveled at the architectural and other accomplishments of that empire that was destroyed by the Spanish invaders in the 1500s, and marveled at the beauty of the country.   

But the two days spent in Misminay were clearly the most rewarding.  We feel blessed to have spent a little time with these wonderful people who have such a gentle spirit about them.  It is so hard for us to imagine living the way they do -- but of course this is how they have lived for hundreds and hundreds of years, and they cannot really envision our world.  Everywhere there are mud-and-brick houses, children with huge smiles and dirty clothes, old women with big grins and only every other tooth in their mouths.  It is amazing how content they appear to be without all the “benefits” of our so-called civilized lives. We were sad to leave the village on the second day . . . happy that we had been able to do a tiny part to make their lives better, and so struck by the peaceful beauty of the place as we drove down the dirt mountain road.  Neither of us will ever forget it!  
Jim & Renee Klein