The Mystery Machine

We have spent almost as much time on this bus as off it in the last few days. The american team arrived on Sunday and we came to a town called Anduhuaylas to work with Paz y Esperanza there. They chose this machine as our chariot.

(August 5th)
5am call. Bus for 5 hours to who knows where. We pass through a town, and headlights reveal men pissing openly in the streets and rats strung up from telegraph wires. Depressingly filthy.

8am. Trundling upwards through yellow ochre landscape as sun rises; reminds me of the moors except those don't have enormous, beautiful eucalyptus trees, and we just keep going higher, and higher, and higher. The road is rough, and the bus rattles like constant percussion.

9am. For an age we are under the cloud, then in it, and then breaking through. Little moments of sun happen on my face and it feels happy.

10am. Arrive in a village called Chaccarampa, which is so high up and draped over the top of a mountain, and does feel like a roof of some sort. We are so high up now, slightly breathless. The sky is deep blue again, with pure white clumps of cloud. After us and the bus have been rattled to pieces on rough roads, this village offers wild tranquility.



The Venture Expeditions team was helping build a wall in the village, and organise a small library that's been put in for the education of the kids. They also showed us a nursery they're pulling together on the side of the hill where previously there was nothing, while we gathered round amongst the kids to listen about the work, eat potatoes and drink agualita - a sugary herbal tea they cook up in big pots with whatever's available. The buildings are made of mud bricks, earth floors, corrugated tin roofing. It is basic.

The people here live a very simple life, but maybe because of that they notice something else that the rest of us don't. They have a sheen to their faces and a gleam in their eyes that I haven't seen anywhere before.



El Pastor of The Church at High Altitude (actually, I don't think that's its real name) looks like a campesino, but he spends so much time in prayer he is permanently smiling with shiny cheeks and tell tale crows feet, eyes always half closed ready to go.

"Gracias Papa."

Taking photographs of these people and the work Paz does with them I am feeling overwhelmed, and feel very far from home, not because of anything bad but because I've never seen a shine like it and it has thrown me. Completely inspiring, yet hard to digest because it's so raw.

I have nothing familar to cling on to whilst figuring it out, but as El Pastor may say, 'my soul finds rest in God alone'. Living simply in the most remote of places, able to see something we don't.

After our journeys in the big green bus, this shall forever be my Mystery Machine motto:

The more we learn, the less we know.