Parque Ecologico de la Molina, Lima, Peru

[Martin Hash]

It’s always an adventure every time my wife, Gwynne & I visit our youngest son, Haven, and his family in Peru. Haven is busy but he usually makes time in his busy schedule to do something with us every day if he can. He showed up in the late afternoon unannounced as usual, not telling us where we were going or what we’d be doing, which is also typical. We don’t ask questions: it wouldn’t help if we did, but that meant I was wearing flip-flops and no hat as we went out the door.

Turned out it was to hiking trails through what was essentially a giant rock garden planted & maintained by the Lima government. Because of COVID, I assume, there was no one else there and the road was barricaded, but low concrete barriers are easy to cross so we followed Haven up the hillside. His wife, Marian, and our grandson, Felix, were waiting for us at the end of a switchback partially along the trek. Marian was pushing Felix on a 3-wheel scooter uphill through the dirt. I wasn’t sure where we were going because it was a long way to the top and we had Felix but Haven scooped him up and headed off at a fast pace. It wasn’t long before they were far ahead of us on the steep, slippery trail: “like a man on a mission,” Gwynne said.



Apparently, we were going to the top, which was problematic but well worth the view along the ridgeline which is the border between the La Molina and Villa Maria districts. Haven & Felix were waiting in a long since abandoned guardtower overlooking both. The tower had no 2nd story floor and the once formidable fence had an opening in it to let hikers & mountain bikers through. I was in awe that anyone would try riding the trail we’d just been on.

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Haven & Felix at guardtower

Homesteading in Lima is as easy as climbing up a 30-degree slope dirt hillside where nothing is growing while hauling up the scrap material required to make a ramshackle shack. There’s no water, and electricity is pirated. Obviously, the city knows about the theft but it’s the most effective way to handle homelessness among people who have the ambition but not the means and the determination to live in Third World conditions. There’s an awful lot of such people immigrating down from the mountainsides of the Andes to do just that, more than half a million so far.

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Shacks on the hillside