Five plane rides, two train rides and far too many hours on a bus have brought us to where we are today, Iquitos, Peru. This is the place where our 2008 GreenHouse Globetrotters worked for two weeks - the city my own father called home for more than three months earlier this year! Still, I am having a hard time grasping the chaos and the poverty. I feel like it's the most broken place on earth. Paul Opp, the Director of the People of Peru Project, told us that aside from Bangkok, Iquitos has the highest volume of sex trafficking and sex vacationing in the world. Just about everywhere you look you see billboards like this one:
There are apx. 600,000 in the city; I think we saw 500,000 of them on our drive in. The infrastructure, the dilapidated buildings, the kids with torn clothing and no shoes, the thirteen and fourteen year-old girls selling themselves in the streets... it has all left me speechless.
No comments:
Post a Comment