La Línea de Meta

La Línea de Meta.

The finish line.

Tomorrow, I pack my bags and head for home. This has been a great trip, and it´s been so nice to have been able to tack on a few days at the end in Lima, to see Hillmer, walk around, relax... Lima has developed so much since I was last here.

We arrived in Lima early on Friday morning, after some real haggling with LC Busre airlines about the weight of our luggage. They were trying to tell me that the bags were too heavy, and we´d have to leave half of the luggage behind, to arrive on another flight later that day. Yeah right. It got pretty heated, but in the end, it´s always amazing what a little money will do. In this case, $70 made the problem go away, and all of a sudden, our tiny plane was no longer at risk of crashing into a mountain because of someone´s leaden suitcase.

We went to the WFP Country Office for Peru, which is a beehive of activity; meetings, visitors, calls, crises, crises averted... We gathered in the rear courtyard of the building, under a tree, to run the ¨WFP Behind the Scenes¨call - an educational conference call series I manage, featuring WFP thought leaders from around the world, to educate our supporters about hunger and the work of WFP in the field. This time, the call would feature the group, discussing the experiences and observations of the past week, visiting remote, indigenous villages at 14,000 feet in the Andes (you can listen to the podcast of this call on about 3/30, and all other WFP Behind Scenes calls here).

The call, frankly, went beautifully. I had spent some time with our Communications rep on the trip, in coming up with some questions for the group interview, and then spent another few hours really drafting a script of the 50-minute call, leading the group through a series of questions and prompting conversations about WFP´s work, and the communities we visited, from start to finish. We were fortunate to have had the WFP Country Director, Guy Gauvreau, join us for most of the call, who was so helpful in filling in the gaps with data, to paint a full picture of what´s going on here.

And after the call... we were done!

A number of people immediately hopped on a plane to Cuszo, to visit Macchu Picchu, while the rest of us spent the afternoon, in stark to contrast to where we had been over the last week, at LarcoMar - an outdoor shopping area, built into the side of a cliff in Lima, looking over the Pacific Ocean. We had mocha frappucinos at Starbucks, drank Pisco sours at an outdoor bar, and bought Cuban cigars. I could see that for some on the trip - those who have not spent time in the developing world - it was hard to reconcile the primitive conditions we had stayed in (where people live on less than a dollar a day without running water or electricity), in contrast to a $4 coffee drink next to a crystal fountain. I understand this, and have spent a lot of time grappling with the same. To me, it´s most interesting that we were not in the USA experiencing this, but still in Peru. The discrepancy between the rich and poor (who tend to be the indigenous populations) is staggering... and I´ve seen this in almost every country I´ve visited.

And then, of course, there´s always coming home... and walking into your house, feeling a little overwhelmed at how much we have - even if we don´t have a lot.

But I´d rather struggle with that, than not be aware of that at all. Taking these trips is so humbling, and always reminds me of the clear difference between the words ¨want¨ and ¨need.¨