The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America

by Brian Kevin

  III

  “Cuidado … cuidaaaado … CUIDADO!!!”

  The other passengers in my combi were screaming in unison as our driver started merging without checking his blind spot. It was morning rush hour on Lima’s Carretera Central, and our jam-packed minivan was about to drift right into its identical twin in the neighboring lane. Combis are Lima’s cheap, privately owned alternatives to the city’s drastically overtaxed bus system. They follow established routes, but without a set schedule, so it’s in their best interest to move as fast as humanly possible, both to maximize their trips and to beat the other combis to the next stop. Vans, trucks, and microbuses like these account for some 20 percent of Lima’s mass transit fleet and more than half of the city’s automobile accidents. I watched feebly out the window as we neared, then ricocheted harmlessly off, the neighboring combi, my face at one point within kissing distance of a similarly helpless rider in the next van over.

  “Animal! Idiota!” my fellow passengers cried.

  Seated next to me, Lara Devries didn’t bat an eyelash. “Stuff like that happens all the time,” she said with a sigh, watching as the other passengers stood up to reshuffle themselves, changing positions in preparation for the next stop. “And now we all play combi musical chairs.”

  Devries is the willowy twenty-six-year-old executive director of the Light and Leadership Initiative, a nonprofit she founded in 2008 to serve women and children in an east Lima shantytown called Huaycán. Two or three times a week, she makes the death-defying combi trip from her apartment in central Lima to the outskirts of the metro, a two-hour odyssey that’s helped her cultivate both nerves of steel and an above-average tolerance for body odor.

  “So anyway,” she asked calmly, “what was I saying?”

  What she’d been saying, I reminded her, was why a twenty-two-year-old blond-haired, blue-eyed gringa from suburban Chicago had chosen to move by herself to Peru after just one visit, then take up work in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the country.

  “Right,” she said, re-cuffing one of the legs of her jeans, then sitting up and shrugging modestly. “I don’t really know what to tell you. I just saw that they needed the help.”

  This much is true. Huaycán is one of the poorest areas in the massively sprawling Lima metro. It didn’t exist at all until the mid-1980s, when the largely rural war against the Shining Path guerrillas prompted an influx of refugees into the cities. The radical Maoist insurgency had evolved in Peru’s mountainous interior, and as they battled the Peruvian military, both groups systematically “cleansed” any villages they suspected of sympathizing with the enemy. By some estimates, a million people were displaced between 1980 and 2000, mostly ethnic indigenous or mestizo families from the highlands, and as many as 200,000 of those migrated into Lima. Communities like Huaycán sprang up seemingly overnight, as campesino families staked claims along the city’s uninhabited urban edge. Basic services like water and electricity took decades to follow. And while Huaycán today is more integrated into the city—more like a very poor suburb than a refugee camp—large swaths of the district still lack sewage and drinking water, the education and employment levels are abysmal, and health issues like malnutrition and tuberculosis are fairly common.

  Devries was a friend of a friend who had met me for coffee, then invited me to tag along on a visit to her project’s headquarters. At six foot one and extremely fair-featured, she stands out on the streets of Lima like a robot at a Renaissance Fair. She has, I imagine, turned the heads of more than a few bricheros—Peruvian slang for local guys who play up their exotic Latino flair to land cute and/or deep-pocketed gringas and, hopefully, a “bridge” to the United States. At an age when many of her peers are still letting Mom and Dad pay the rent, Devries is like some kind of Aryan expat Energizer Bunny, teaching English around town and pursuing a master’s degree in psychology when she isn’t managing volunteers and finances at Light and Leadership.

  “Huaycán will give you a different view of poverty,” she’d told me over coffee. “People think of it in this Third World way, all sparse landscapes and swollen bellies. But some of our kids have cell phones. They have a lot of the trappings, but they still have trouble meeting basic needs, and they have zero in the way of social mobility.”

  On our way to Light and Leadership, our roller-coaster combi passed through the wealthy district La Molina, within spitting distance of Reid’s American school, and I thought how strange it was that on any given school day, his students and Devries’s are all of twelve miles apart. It took our combi over an hour to navigate the gridlock of those twelve miles, which seemed like an appropriate measure of the socioeconomic distance, if not the geographic one.

  As we crossed into Huaycán, the first thing I noticed was how the dense rows of cinder-block shanties crowding the hillsides resembled all those old pictures of tiered Inca ruins. All that was missing were the llamas. In every direction, the landscape was brown and brittle, dry and sun-baked in a way that suggested a place not intended for human habitation. The community is actually built within and up the slopes of an alluvial gorge, like a giant skateboarder’s half-pipe. It’s a steep, dry, and dusty bowl of about 200,000 souls, and the word huaycán derives from Quechua lingo for the mudslides that still claim lives whenever the desert coast has an uncharacteristically rainy season.

  Devries and I hopped out at a busy commercial intersection, the usual chaotic mix of fruit vendors and appliance stores, unmuffled engines and earsplitting boom boxes. The sidewalks were as crowded as your average Manhattan lunch hour, with all manner of merchandise spilling out onto the pavement from beneath dingy and sun-faded awnings. In the road, the dirt bikes and moto-taxis outnumbered the cars, whining and weaving around one another in an insectoid swarm. The crowd was noticeably browner than in Miraflores or Breña, not a criollo in sight, and as we waded into the throng, it would have been hard to lose track of Devries, a full head taller than most anyone around her and possibly the only blonde for miles.

  Painted ads for Keiko and Humala still covered the sides of most buildings. Keiko won Huaycán’s district, as she won virtually every other district in Lima, but here by a much slimmer margin than in the city’s wealthier sectors. She had, in fact, kicked off her campaign here some months before. Huaycán is a pretty compulsory stump-circuit stopover for any Peruvian politician. It’s sort of Peru’s equivalent of a hard-luck Detroit auto factory—you’re not a serious contender until you’ve had your photo-op here. And I could see why. As Devries and I walked away from the main drag, the streets turned to dirt. Every third or fourth building seemed to be crumbling in some conspicuous fashion—top floors boarded up, roofs caved in—and the barrenness of the surrounding hillsides was like a wraparound metaphor for the lack of opportunity. If you’re looking for a classic tableau of urban poverty to stand sympathetically in front of, Huaycán is prime real estate.

  We walked to a gated three-story house a few blocks from where the bus dropped us off, easily the most kept-up in the neighborhood. Inside, Devries introduced me to her current crop of volunteers: a British guy, a Finnish girl, and four Americans, all under thirty and all looking a bit ragged. Light and Leadership’s volunteers spend their afternoons and evenings running an exhaustive slate of classes for some 150 adults and school-aged kids. Basic English is a fixture, as is arithmetic. Adult women show up for bimonthly workshops on subjects like nutrition and computer literacy. Huaycán is divided into a scatter of twenty alphabetical zones, most of them accessible by combi, and L&L’s classes are spread across several zones, so when volunteers aren’t leading sessions or working on curricula, they spend a lot of time shuttling from one dusty ridge and clapboard schoolhouse to another. I caught them during their lunch hour and listened quietly as they gorged on pasta and briefed Devries on which combis weren’t running and which students hadn’t been showing up for class.

  After lunch, I got a tour of the classroom facilities next door, a clean and bright couple of rooms filled wit
h donated books, computers, and art supplies. Everything was locked up behind heavy iron gates, of course, but the space compared favorably to your average Boys & Girls Club back home. About half of L&L’s programs were held there on-site, Devries explained, in the centrally located neighborhood known as Zone D. That afternoon, though, the British volunteer was teaching an English class in Zone R, high atop the half-pipe’s eastern slope and one of the more far-flung parts of Huaycán. So Devries and I walked a few more dusty blocks to catch a microbus and join him.

  Light and Leadership is a textbook example of the modern phenomenon known as “voluntourism.” In addition to covering their own airfare and pocket money, all of Devries’s volunteers pay a weekly fee for their food, housing, and basic utilities. They also cook and maintain the house when they’re not teaching or performing administrative duties. A month of volunteering in Huaycán costs each participant a little over $600, which is money that would set you up pretty nicely at one of your more upscale Miraflores B&Bs. The fact that Devries rarely wants for volunteers just shows how many gringos would rather spend their vacation days sweating in a shantytown schoolhouse than freewheeling along the Gringo Trail.

  “Of course,” Devries said, “when I explain this to my friends from Lima, nobody understands. They just look at me confused, like, ‘Why would anyone do that?’ ”

  Our bus was grinding its gears up a steep and gravelly incline, leaving a plume behind it like a tail-spinning jet. As we climbed the walls of the gorge, the cinder-block buildings out the window gradually changed over to jumbled rows of plank houses.

  “But do you get a few volunteers from Lima anyway?” I asked. “People just who pitch in for a day or two?”

  “Almost none,” she said, matter-of-factly. “And it isn’t for lack of trying.”

  “Really?” I was surprised. “Why do you think that is?”

  Devries sat quietly for a minute and pursed her lips. She reached back and did a twisty maneuver with her long pony-tail, pulling it tighter against her head. Then she leaned over and pointed out the window next to me.

  “Do you see how all those houses are the same color?” she asked. I looked out. Sure enough, all the clapboard shanties out the windows were an identical shade of baby blue. “The neighbors here pitch in to buy their paint in bulk, so as you work your way up the hillsides, all of the neighborhoods look like they’ve been color-coded.”

  Higher up the hill, I could see where the blue houses gave way to residential clusters of dusty salmon, harder to pick out against the totalizing beige of the mountainside. Devries and I rode awhile longer in silence before she took a stab at answering my question.

  “Honestly,” she said, “I don’t think the middle and upper classes here understand what it means to be poor.”

  She said it with a note of resignation, as if admitting something she hadn’t wanted to—maybe to me, maybe to herself.

  “That’s not so uncommon, really,” I said. “Like they don’t understand the extent of it? They don’t really get how bad it is?”

  “No,” she said, “it’s more than that. It’s like they don’t even understand who these people are. ‘How did they all get here? Where did they all come from? What do they want?’ I’m not sure they really know how to process it.”

  I thought that over for a second.

  “Why?” I asked. “Because they’re sheltered? Because they don’t see enough of it?”

  “Oh, they see plenty of it,” Devries said. “Maybe not out here in Huaycán, but they see it in the city every day. It’s more like there’s just such a dramatic gulf.”

  Without knowing it, she was echoing Thompson. The Ins and the Outs, he had said, with a vast gulf in between. It occurred to me that Huaycán didn’t even exist when Thompson was here, that the notion of 200,000 people scraping a living off these parched hillsides would probably have seemed absurd.

  “Fine,” I said, trying to understand, “but there’s a gulf between rich and poor in the US, too. I don’t get why it should be so different here.”

  Devries furrowed her brow. We were the only two people left on the bus now, which was rapidly running out of road as it approached a one-room plank-and-sheet-metal schoolhouse, standing alone near the top of the slope.

  “I think there’s just less empathy here,” she said finally. “Maybe it’s because there’s no social mobility. There’s no conception that you could have been one of those people, you know? Or that they might work hard and someday become you.”

  We climbed out of the combi and headed into the tiny stand-alone schoolhouse. The inside was dim and cool, with dirt floors. Ten or so elementary schoolkids were gathered around a table, watching the British guy point to a stick figure on a whiteboard, phonetically repeating English words for body parts. Ee-ur. Stuh-meck. Ell-boh. When Devries and I walked in, a handful of the kids got up and gathered excitedly around her legs. How was their day going, she asked them in Spanish. Most of the kids clearly recognized her as the chief gringa, although a few may just have been captivated by the foreign creature in their midst—this tall, pale woman who spoke their language and had to crouch when she stepped through the doorways.

  I grabbed a seat on a rough wooden bench and helped a couple of boys in baseball caps fill out their anatomy worksheets. They had a knack for English, I told them, and they laughed and said I spoke good Spanish—the first and last time I have ever received that compliment. The next hour went by very quickly as we all sat around the table, repeating after each other and pointing one at a time to our hands, our heads, our hearts.

  On one of my last days in Lima, I took a taxi to La Molina to join a faculty game of Ultimate Frisbee at Reid’s school. The campus, needless to say, made both my high school and elementary school look like the cinder-block facilities in Huaycán. Reid’s was just one in a line of spotless, exterior-entry classrooms, with a whole wall of windows and more high-end AV equipment than a Tokyo Apple Store. We played Frisbee on an immaculate lawn stretched between clusters of brick buildings and were serenaded during the game by a talent show under way inside the state-of-the-art theater.

  In case you’re wondering, neither the students nor their successful capitalist parents ever fled to Miami. Peru’s stock market plummeted the day after Ollanta Humala’s victory, but it has since bounced back and then some, as Presidente Humala has turned out to be a surprisingly centrist leader. During the run-off election, he scrapped his plans to nationalize the country’s private pension system, and he swore on a Bible before a TV audience to uphold free-market principles and abide by term limits. Today, Humala keeps leftist neighbors like Correa at arm’s length and instead publicly identifies with former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, whose combination of market capitalism and generous social spending made him one of the world’s most popular leaders. Meanwhile, the moneyed class in Lima has happily continued, as Thompson put it, “maintaining itself in the style to which it has long been accustomed.”

  Reid and I got a ride back to Miraflores with one of his coworkers, a high school English teacher whose beat-up sedan had sprung a serious exhaust leak. As we idled our way through the city’s debilitating traffic, the car gradually filled with noxious fumes. Amid the stench, our conversation turned to those aspects of life in Lima that the two of them didn’t much care for. Traffic, they agreed, was hellish. Reid said he had lately been unable to ignore countless tiny instances of petty rudeness—adults cutting in lines, pedestrians butting shoulders, cars ignoring the crosswalks. Sometimes, he vented, it seemed as if Peruvians simply had an ingrained disregard for other people around them.

  “You know what’s getting to me?” the English teacher said. “Walls and gates.” He braked to avoid hitting a moto-taxi that veered into his lane. “Everywhere I go, I’m surrounded by walls and gates.” They really did seem pretty ubiquitous around Lima. From Miraflores to Huaycán, most public buildings and virtually every private home seemed to be surrounded by tall iron bars or brick walls
topped with broken bottles. The two teachers described private beaches south of town where security guards monitored gates like bouncers holding velvet ropes. Even after my short time in Lima, I could see how this might come to seem oppressive.

  “I think I’d get tired of that pretty quick,” I said, my head partially craned out the window to avoid the exhaust smell, “always feeling like you’re being kept out of someplace.”

  “Yeah, but do you know what’s worse?” the English teacher asked. “What’s worse are the people on the other side, the ones who just have no idea about anything because they’ve only ever been on the inside of the walls.”

  He might have said more, but then a combi swerved violently in front of us, narrowly missing a taxi, and a deafening crush of car horns cut the conversation short.

  IV

  “Day and night are one,” Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley. “The setting sun is neither an invitation nor a command to stop, for the traffic rolls constantly.”

  Overnight buses are a fact of life for travelers in South America. It’s a big continent, with substantial geographic obstacles and occasionally shoddy infrastructure, so a distance that might require a long day’s drive in the United States instead becomes a twenty-four-hour odyssey of stale air and wildly fluctuating temperatures. Thompson made some of his early jaunts by plane, but with his typewriter and camera weighing him down and his finances ever dwindling, he realized in Peru that it was time to join the great unwashed masses. “It cost me $38 simply to get my gear from Guayaquil to Lima,” he explained in a letter. “It goes without saying that I have taken my last plane in South America.” From Lima to Rio, the rest of Thompson’s route would be carried out by bus and train—“a mad, headlong, poverty-stricken rush across the continent.”