One Year Later

Exactly one year ago, I left a bustling Peruvian town in the central Andes and returned to my friends and family in New York, where life had bustled along without me for eleven months. I threw myself back into life in the States, eager to be on my own again in an apartment, with a new job, a car and even my own shopping list.

I had relinquished certain freedoms while living in Peru. My host mother cooked all my meals and I was at home every night before sundown. I only went so far on my Saturday morning walks, realizing that the unpaved streets past the central market become exceedingly unfriendly. My weekend entertainment was often hand washing my clothes and reading one of the few English books I brought with me. I stayed in and stayed close.

In many ways, this past year in Schenectady has not been much different. While I enjoy more personal space and less awkward stares, I find that I have continued to stay in and stay close.

I enjoy a quiet twenty-minute walk to work, just as I did in Peru, needing the meditative buffer zone between the women’s shelter where I spend my days and my own quite corner of the world in the Stockade. I still prefer farmer’s markets to grocery stores and continue to write letters to my friends, even though they are now just a phone call away.

However, what is most strikingly similar to life in Peru are the faces I encounter during the day at the inner-city rescue mission where I work. Whether a nineteen year-old single mother or a fifty-three year old recovering alcoholic, the women who enter our doors express the same underlying needs as the women and children I worked with in Huánuco – safe shelter, acknowledgement and dignity.

Initially, I didn’t see the connection between Huánuco and Schenectady. One is a largely agrarian supported economy with a large presence of indigenous culture, which resembles life well before Spanish influence. Schenectady, on the other hand, has a history of technological discovery and industry with a large immigrant population and a social service agency at every corner.

With obvious differences in terms of history, culture and access to resources, what then makes these towns similar? What draws these two communities, some 3,635 miles apart, nearer than say, Schenectady and Saratoga?

What seems to be the unifying factor is the extent of human need and the sincerity of community response. Whether through spiritual guidance and shelter for families at the City Mission or psychological counseling for survivors of sexual abuse at Paz y Experanza (Peace and Hope), the Andes meets upstate New York in surprisingly personal ways.

In early November, a young woman moved into the shelter where I work. She arrived by bus from Queens with her two month-old daughter hidden beneath a fleece blanket draped over her stroller. She was quite unsure where she had arrived, but knew instinctively that this was a better place than what she had left behind.

The young woman, barely twenty years old, had recently lost her aunt, who had raised her in her parents’ absence. Just weeks before she relocated to Schenectady, her cousin was shot and killed on the streets in Queens.

The young woman hid her grief well, through a wide smile and edgy sarcasm. I was unaware of her deep sense of loss until a week after her arrival, sitting beside her in her apartment at the shelter.

“What were your growing up years like?” I asked, as we went through the shelter’s welcome packet called “Tilling the Soil.” She said she spent most of her youth on the streets, getting into trouble and having little guidance. She had her first child at age fifteen and her second a year later. Both are in the custody of a relative while her newborn daughter came with her to Schenectady.

“What good things happened to you?” I continued. She said she was never without friends and found herself always part of a group. “What sad or hurtful things happened to you?” She paused and read from what she wrote on the page. “Everyone around me is dying,” she spoke stoically. She began to cry and I didn’t attempt to say anything. I placed one hand against her back and the other on her shoulder.

In the moment of silence that passed between us I remembered a young woman named Rosa, who I had met in Huánuco, Peru. Like the new resident from Queens, Rosa became a mother at age fifteen. In the tradition of her village, after her mother died she assumed the role of wife for her father and grandfather. Her one year old son is the product of incest, yet Rosa is unsure with which relative he was conceived.

While the experiences of these women are markedly different, for both, the streets of their upbringing ended their childhood prematurely. These two girls became women and mothers before they were given the chance to ask themselves, “What do I want out of life.”

I met Rosa and her son at a small shelter on a farm outside of Huánuco. A modest cinder-block room with three beds and a playpen is called La Casa de Buen Trato (The House of Good Treatment), and provides a home for three teenage mothers and their babies. Now, a year later, the House of Good Treatment has grown into a fifty-bed facility built on an adjacent alfalfa field, where cows used to roam and graze.

In that same year, Rosa has learned to knit blankets and make chocolate, which she sells at the local market to support herself and her son. At the same time, the young woman from Queens is taking parenting classes at the City Mission and has been reunited with her older daughter for the summer.

Now, a year later, I am finding that I am continually shocked by the realities of today’s women but also more equipped to come alongside of them. I find that my time spent in Peru prepared me to be more directly involved in the process of women’s recovery and less likely to feel overwhelmed and defeated.

Now, a year later, I remember the women I met in Peru and find that their stories continue in the lives of the families I work with at the City Mission. And if the women in Schenectady, myself included, could gain something from Rosa and countless others like her, it would be their courage, their resilience and their prevailing gratitude.